Meleagris Gallopavo—the American Turkey / 309 The moneyed aristokrats are like certain fine coated animals, worth just what their hides will bring. The mackrels are remarkable for their numbers and the small kapi-tal they dew bizziness on; and while arrayed in their false dignity, and straining hard tew cheat us in awl things, are like a drunken man trie-ing tew walk a krack. The pedigrees hav mutch innosense and little courage. Content with the glory ov their ancestors, they are satisfied in holding under our noses a grandfather’s fossils, and fondly beleaf that the bones make them smell ov greatness. Finally, trieing tew be a fust klass aristokrat in America, just yet, appears tew us tew be almost as flattring an enterprise as climbing a greased pole. Thare is great doubt about our being able to reach the top, and if we dew succeed (and don’t pull the pole up after us) we will soon hav the mortifikashun ov seeing some other sheumaker climbing up the same pole. —Don’t be an aristocrat if you kan help it. : Audubon and other scientific bushwhackers having discribed the hab­ its, manners and personal appearance of this distinguished fowl, as it exists in its native thickets, I shall say little or nothing of the Wild Tur­

doi:10.4324/9781351181563-46

Chapter

Meleagris Gallopavo—the American Turkey / 309 The moneyed aristokrats are like certain fine coated animals, worth just what their hides will bring. The mackrels are remarkable for their numbers and the small kapi-tal they dew bizziness on; and while arrayed in their false dignity, and straining hard tew cheat us in awl things, are like a drunken man trie-ing tew walk a krack. The pedigrees hav mutch innosense and little courage. Content with the glory ov their ancestors, they are satisfied in holding under our noses a grandfather’s fossils, and fondly beleaf that the bones make them smell ov greatness. Finally, trieing tew be a fust klass aristokrat in America, just yet, appears tew us tew be almost as flattring an enterprise as climbing a greased pole. Thare is great doubt about our being able to reach the top, and if we dew succeed (and don’t pull the pole up after us) we will soon hav the mortifikashun ov seeing some other sheumaker climbing up the same pole. —Don’t be an aristocrat if you kan help it.

Chapter

Meleagris Gallopavo—the American Turkey / 309 The moneyed aristokrats are like certain fine coated animals, worth just what their hides will bring. The mackrels are remarkable for their numbers and the small kapi-tal they dew bizziness on; and while arrayed in their false dignity, and straining hard tew cheat us in awl things, are like a drunken man trie-ing tew walk a krack. The pedigrees hav mutch innosense and little courage. Content with the glory ov their ancestors, they are satisfied in holding under our noses a grandfather’s fossils, and fondly beleaf that the bones make them smell ov greatness. Finally, trieing tew be a fust klass aristokrat in America, just yet, appears tew us tew be almost as flattring an enterprise as climbing a greased pole. Thare is great doubt about our being able to reach the top, and if we dew succeed (and don’t pull the pole up after us) we will soon hav the mortifikashun ov seeing some other sheumaker climbing up the same pole. —Don’t be an aristocrat if you kan help it.

ABSTRACT

The Puritan Fathers, self-denying saints though they were, could not hear that invitation to gormandize continually resounding through the woods of the Bay Colony, unmoved. It amounted, in their half-starved condition, to a cruel taunt, and moistened their sympathetic palates with epicurean tears. Yielding to their carnal appetites, they slew and ate, and although the Noble Savage, on discovering their taste for tur key, often lured them into the depths of the forest with imitative “gob bles,” and by that means took many steeple-crowned scalps, the work went bravely on as long as the game lasted. I blame not those solemn gluttons for risking their lives to obtain such delicious fare. Under the same circumstances I should have done likewise.