bass tuba player emptying his instrument at the end of a hard street parade.

   But I doubt it. These stories were probably the creations of the professional humorists in the first place. Those who are given real food to eat may generally be depended upon to do the eating without undue noise or excitement. The gross person featured in the comic papers, who consumes his food with such careless abandon that it is hard to tell whether the front

   of his vest was originally drygoods or groceries, either doesn't exist in real life or else never had any food that was worth eating, and it didn't make any difference whether he put it on the inside of his chest or the outside.

   Only a short time ago I saw a whole turkey served for a Thanksgiving feast at a large restaurant. It vaunted itself as a regular turkey and was extensively charged for as such on the bill. It wasn't though. It was an ancient and a shabby ruin—a genuine antique if ever there was one, with those high-polished knobs all down the front, like an old-fashioned highboy, and Chippendale legs. To make up for its manifold imperfections the chef back in the kitchen had crowded it full of mysterious laboratory products and then varnished it over with a waterproof glaze or shellac, which rendered it durable without making it edible. Just to see that turkey was a thing calculated to set the mind harking backward to places and times when there had been real turkeys to eat.

   Back yonder in the old days we were a

   simple and a husky race, weren't we? Boys and girls were often fourteen years old before they knew oysters didn't grow in a can. Even grown people knew nothing, except by vague hearsay, of cheese so runny that if you didn't care to eat it you could drink it. There was one traveled person then living who was reputed to have once gone up to the North somewhere and partaken of a watermelon that had had a plug cut in it and a whole quart of imported real Paris—France—champagne wine poured in the plugged place. This, however, was generally regarded as a gross exaggeration of the real facts.

   But there was a kind of a turkey that they used to serve in those parts on high state occasions. It was a turkey that in his younger days ranged wild in the woods and ate the mast. At the frosted coming of the fall they penned him up and fed him grain to put an edge of fat on his lean; and then fate descended upon him and he died the ordained death of his kind. But, oh! the glorious resurrection when he reached the 

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