The girls in their enthusiasm had given the dinner many touches that more experienced housewives would never have happened to think of. The color scheme was golden orange and brown. The center-piece was a triumphant pumpkin hollowed out and scalloped and laden with oranges, grapes, and very red apples. The turkey smoked in the middle of the table with the vegetable dishes clustered around it. And in most beautiful script, worked out in nuts and stem raisins arranged on the tablecloth, was the word "Thanksgiving."
At each place was the "grind" with the person's name on it, and such shrieks of laughter as filled the room while the girls, the principal and the old man trouped around the table reading the funny legends, examining the ridiculous souvenirs appended, all in a hurried and eager endeavor to find their own places! Not nearly all of the girls could sit at the table--there were sixty in the school,--but the grinds were arranged near together and then each girl took her plate with a plentiful helping of everything and sat down in one of the chairs by the fireplace or against the wall of the great dining-room.
Mr. Huntington was not "ground" so very badly, after all. He found at his place a quaint little box painted to represent a house, with tiny doors and windows marked on it. It bore the legend "Gloomy House," and falling from the door were weird little pasteboard roly-poly objects labeled "Glooms." These were flat but stood erect by virtue of wee standards at the back pasted to the paper yard of the house. They were in all attitudes of scurrying away with ridiculous faces expressing grief. A slip of paper invited: "Lift the roof of Gloomy House and see why the Glooms flee."
Mr. Huntington laughed with the rest, but his hand slightly trembled as he slowly lifted the roof of the little pasteboard house. Inside were sixty fudge hearts and a further assurance, "Sixty hearts of sixty girls."
Could it be possible that there were tears in his eyes to make them glisten suddenly like that? Peggy looked down at her grind to hide the sudden swift seriousness that passed over her own face, when her eyes met something so incredible that she burst into shrieks of laughter. She had prepared most of the grinds with the others, but of course hers had been kept a secret and she had not seen it until this minute. Hers and Katherine's were in one, being nothing more nor less than two smashed dolls somewhat jumbled up in appearance, one wearing a blue Peter Thompson and the other a red coat. There were black and blue bumps painted on their dented foreheads. Around the waist of the red-coated doll went a ribbon on which was lettered frantically,