1434 
The RURAL. NEW-YORKER 
November 15, 1924 
Hope Farm Notes 
THE THANKSGSVING SONG 
Part I. 
Some years ago I happened to be in 
Hartford, Conn., the day before Thanks¬ 
giving. There is something peculiar about 
that holiday. The President dignifies it 
by issuing a proclamation ; some of them 
seem to me rather stale and perfunctory, 
as though the job had been turned over to 
some understrapper—if I may be par¬ 
doned for applying such a term to dig¬ 
nified officials. The entire nation cele¬ 
brates the day, in various ways; there are 
football games, prizefights, dances, home 
gatherings and great dinners. I have cel¬ 
ebrated the holiday all the way from 
Cape Cod to Colorado, and from Missis¬ 
sippi to Cake Superior, but the only real, 
honest, heart-to-heart celebration of 
Thanksgiving must have a certain back¬ 
ground to be effective. There should be a 
dull, leaden sky, a somber view of distant 
hills, bare trees, half frozen ground, hun¬ 
gry crows flying out of the woods, and 
that mysterious, whispering sound which 
comes in the New England air when the 
last wild geese fly south and the sharp 
frost skirmishers run out before the com¬ 
ing army of ice. For an ideal setting, you 
must have such things in New England 
in some place where one may feel that he 
is standing between the wealth of 
the modern city and the loneliness 
of an abandoned farm. In Hartford 
that year I found the stage exact¬ 
ly set for the true celebration. You 
can stand on a corner of that central 
square in Hartford, and feel that within 
a sweep of half a mile there is greater 
wealth per capita than in any other sec¬ 
tion of equal size in America—with the 
possible exception of Wall Street. For in 
Wall Street there would be many more 
people to divide up the wealth. Then, 
after this contemplation, you may get into 
a car, ride half an hour, and find yourself 
in perhaps the most desolate and melan¬ 
choly section you can find east of the 
Mississippi River. You will stand on 
hills where, long ago, there were pros¬ 
perous homes and farms—where mjm and 
women lived who made New England, 
and through it made the nation. Here 
they lived and worked and celebrated 
Thanksgiving at its best. They were 
pioneers, or children of pioneers, who 
pushed away from the seacoast and 
plunged into the unknown forest to make 
America. They made the nation,'but they 
unmade themselves while doing it, for to¬ 
day those old farms and homes are mere¬ 
ly ' rocky hillsides. You can stand here 
and look far away to Hartford and see 
the gilded dome of the State Capitol— 
“The Governor’s pun’kin” they call it— 
as it glitters in the sunlight. Yes, indeed, 
these scenes and such memories formed 
in the shadows of a dull, gloomy day, 
represent the scenery for an ideal per¬ 
formance of Thanksgiving. We had them 
all that day in Hartford. While I was 
waiting for the man who was to meet me, 
I walked through the markets. People 
were out buying their dinner, in just 
about the way that their ancestors for 
two centuries or more had acted. On that 
old day when Thanksgiving was invented, 
a file of Indians marched out of the woods 
bringing a load of wild turkeys as their 
share of the feast. Fingers were made be¬ 
fore forks, and, anyway, there were very 
lew forks in America at that time. These 
Indians sat around, each with half a 
bird in his hands and gnawed away, great¬ 
ly to the benefit of their teeth. . And I 
can remember another Thanksgiving in 
Plvmouth. It was the last year of the 
Civil War. There was hardly a young 
and vigorous man left on the streets. 
Elderly men or men who had lost a limb 
in battle did the work. All the others 
were in the army. Main Street was 
lined with farmers who had brought in 
chickens or tux-keys for sale. As I recall 
it, our family did not expect to have any 
turkey that year, but rather late in the 
forenoon there came a limping farmer 
with a big fat bird, which he brought as 
an offering to the family of his old cap¬ 
tain. For my father was captain of the 
local company. He lost his life at Fred¬ 
ericksburg. This man had followed him 
into battle, and now he came, a limping 
veteran, with this offering. You see, I 
have neglected to give one of the chief es¬ 
sentials if we are to stage an ideal 
Thanksgiving. One must have a touch of 
Yankee blood in him and go back in mem¬ 
ory to some such picture as that of the 
old soldier in his blue army overcoat, 
limping down the street with his offering 
to the captain’s family. Christmas is 
quite another matter. I doubt if the New 
England people ever were adepts at cele¬ 
brating it. but, when it conies to Thanks¬ 
giving—why, they made the holiday ! 
***** « 
I was thinking of these things as I wan¬ 
dered through the market, when I became 
aware that a big, red-faced man was 
watching me. It is curious about this 
thing of watching people. Once half a 
dozen of us on a ferryboat agreed to look 
hard at the feet of a certain man as he 
walked past us. We just looked and 
smiled. The poor thing became greatly 
excited and wanted to fight one of us. A 
young woman on a train become greatly 
annoyed at the persistent staring of a 
man who sat opposite her At last she com¬ 
plained to the conductor, only to find that 
the man was stone blind and did not even 
know the woman was there. It was evi¬ 
dent that this big red-faced man was 
studying me, and somehow there was 
something familiar about his face, too. 
So I stopped and spoke to him. 
“You seem interested in me, my 
friend.” 
“I am. I'm trying to decide whether 
I’ll bet even or five to one that your name 
is Bert.” 
“You win, for people have called me 
that!” 
“I knew it, Bert. Your wife and a few 
old friends have that privilege. That 
other name of your’s misses me. My 
daughter went to England and saw a big 
stone figure of a man in some public 
square with your name marked on it. As 
I remember it, there was ‘wood’ in it, and 
I says to my daughter, ‘I’ll bet he was 
some kin of my old friend Bert!’ ” 
“What made you think of that?” 
“Why, don’t ‘wood’ run your mind to 
lumber? The last time I saw you, Bert, 
was up in the pine woods in Cooney 
Camp. You mind the time that Andy the 
cookie got drunk and the boss sent you 
in to help the cook. You had a bag tied 
around your neck for an apron, and you 
were washing dishes in a wooden tub. 
Bert, you had the makings of a great 
cook in you. When Andy fried pork he 
put it all in with the fat and we got it 
out like spearing pickerel in a pond. You 
gave us the pork, crisp and brown, by 
itself, with the fat in another dish, for 
any who wanted it. I said to myself then, 
‘Bert is a born cook, and if Nature has 
her way he’ll make a gi-eat hotel keeper 
some day.’ ” 
Then the mists of nearly 40 years 
cleared away, and I knew this man. 
“Why, it’s Bai-ney Finnegan !” 
“The same to you, Bert, but they tag 
me now as Barnabas, and since I held a 
little office my high-toned daughter brands 
me as ‘honorable.’ You see what I have 
to put up with, Bert.” 
Long years before Barney and I had 
worked together in a lumber camp in 
Northern Michigan. Men come to know 
each other in such rough partnership of 
labor. The superficial things of life are 
lost in the woods, and men appi-oach each 
other through elemental motives and de¬ 
sires. One can never lose such days, and 
there in that public market Barney and I 
forgot our business and went back to the 
old days. Barney had prospered. Short¬ 
ly after we sepai-ated he bought an old 
horse and started an express route. He 
gave good sei-vice, and little by little built 
up his business until he became a great 
builder and contractoi-. Here he was now 
the Hon. Barnabas Finnegan, president 
of a convention of contractors then meet¬ 
ing in Hartford. Barney had taken a 
man’s full part in the great romantic 
labor struggle which American youth had 
gone through so gaily and successfully. 
And here was the rich and stroxig Barna¬ 
bas, happy that Thanksgiving should 
bring his old friends who had know him 
only as “Barney”—long before wealth 
and power had bitten into him. 
“Say, Bex-t, do you remember the time 
I and you and .Jinx Foster and Hugh 
Titus went to that lap supper and dance 
at Mother Gainer’s? Hugh took his fid¬ 
dle along and played for the dancers. You 
danced with an Indian girl and they voted 
you the prize.” 
I am not sure that I care to have my 
supposed exploits with Indian girls re¬ 
ported at home. I suppose we all have 
well-capped cells of honey far down in 
memory which are not to be disturbed. 
But there could be no disputing Barney’s 
statements, though I am now long past 
the time when I can win prizes at danc¬ 
ing, even in classes adapted to my age. 
But at Thanksgiving it is well to let mem¬ 
ory run riot. I do not even remember 
what this prize was. In any event, I am 
sure that the Indian girl was far more 
responsible for our winning than I ever 
was. But at any rate, I had something 
to think about the next time I hear my 
childi-en singing 
“'Wild roved the Indian girl, 
Sweet Alferetta.” 
“Yes, Bert, you cut a good figure that 
night, and going back to camp we talked 
things over. Say, Bert, did you marry 
the girl you told me about, after all?” 
“Well, Barney, I am not sure that I 
married the girl, but I know I finally 
married the girl, and that’s enough.” 
“Is it, Bert? I’m not so sure! I have 
a wife that weighs 270 pounds, and six 
fine children, 'but sometimes, among 
frieixds now, like we are here, or like we 
were, young and hopeful, going home from 
Mother Gainer’s, I sometimes think I'd 
give the entix-e seven of them for that one 
100 -pound girl who died on me years ago. 
But that’s between old fx-iends, Bert— 
between old friends and no more.” 
Barney’s convention had opened, and 
my business friend was waiting, too, yet 
still we stood there talking of old times. 
Suddenly Barney remembered something 
inxportant. 
“Bert,” he said, “have you a copy of 
the song?” 
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