The General noted his son’s solemnity and deferred to it. “I’m glad you gave that poor devil the turkeys,” he said. “I suppose they’re as poor as they make ’em. Only--what do you think, Tracy; as long as I’d shot all the birds, I might have been consulted, eh, about giving them away?”
The query was put in a jocular enough tone, but it grated upon the young man’s mood. “I don’t think the turkey business is one that either of us particularly shines in,” he replied, with a snap in his tone. “You say that your turkeys cost you nine dollars apiece. Apparently I am by way of paying fifteen dollars each for my two.”
“‘By way of’--that’s an English expression, isn’t it?” put in Reuben, hastily, to avert the threatened domestic dispute. “I’ve seen it in novels, but I never heard it used before.”
The talk was fortunately turned at this from poultry to philology; and the General, though he took no part in the conversation, evinced no desire to return to the less pleasant subject. Thus the three walked on to the corner where their ways separated. As they stood here for the parting moment, Reuben said in an aside to Horace:
“That was a kindly act of yours--to give Lawton the turkeys. I can’t tell you how much it pleased me. Those little things show the character of a man. If you like to come down to my office Friday, and are still of the same mind about a partnership, we will talk it over.”
CHAPTER VI.--THANKSGIVING AT THE MINSTERS’.
I REMEMBER having years ago been introduced to one of America’s richest men, as he sat on the broad veranda of a Saratoga hotel in the full glare of the morning sunlight. It is evident that at such a solemn moment I should have been filled with valuable and impressive reflections; yet, such is the perversity and wrong-headedness of the human mind, I could for the life of me evolve no weightier thought than this: “Here is a man who can dispose of hundreds of millions of dollars by a nod of the head, yet cannot with all this countless wealth command a dye for his whiskers which will not turn violet in the sunshine!”
The sleek and sober-visaged butler who moved noiselessly about the dining-room of the Minster household may have had some such passing vision of the vanity of riches, as he served what was styled a Thanksgiving dinner. Vast as the fortune was, it could not surround that board with grateful or lighthearted people upon even this selected festal day.