There was no father in this Pepper household. He died when Phronsie was a baby, and Mrs. Pepper struggled along bravely, making coats to put bread into her own and her children’s mouths. And the children, healthy and rugged, and happy-go-lucky, came up or “scrambled up,” as Mrs. Pepper said, and fairly made the little old brown house ring with their cheery life.
Polly was ten, and Ben one year older, and it was the one great ambition of their lives “to help Mother.” The only thing in which Ben could really boast superiority over Polly, aside from his being a boy while she was only a girl, was the fact that once on a great and memorable visit with his father to a neighboring farm, he had eaten a piece of chicken pie; oh, so perfectly splendid! And to Polly, who had never tasted or even seen one, he dilated upon it, till she was nearly wild with curiosity and longing at the delightful vision he brought up.
“Oh, Ben, was it good?” she would say the five-hundredth time, as in some interval when work “slacked up,” perhaps when they crouched at dusk on the kitchen floor, the wink of fire from the old stove lighting up their absorbed little faces, they imagined or played they had all their fancied dreams or wildest wishes realized.
“Yes, you better believe!” Ben smacked his lips; “seem’s if I taste it now!”
“Well, how did it taste?” questioned Polly, still for the five-hundredth time.
“Oh, like,—well, like everything nice; there was fat, and wing, and oh, the wishbone, Polly, and a thick crust, oh, thicker’n my hand, and the juice was prime, and, well, it was all the nice tastes together you ever had in your life, Polly Pepper!”
“O dear!” Polly would sigh, “don’t you s’pose we’ll ever have one, Ben? I could make one, I know; I can ’most see one now, you’ve told me about it so many times.”
And Polly would shut her eyes, and give herself up to the delicious thought till she had to hop up to put the children to bed, or to help Mother in the many ways in which she knew so well how to save her steps. And now here was a fine chicken come right to their very door!
The Pepper family had no cow, nor pig, nor even a chick. The only thing of life in the animal kingdom belonging to the household was an old gray goose; too old and tough to benefit any one by her death. She was just as cross as she could be, or at least she might have amused the children and been of some comfort. She had grown for ever so long in her present quarters, wandering around the poor Little Brown House and shed, picking up a scanty living and taking thanklessly all the bits that the children still conscientiously fed her.
Polly and Ben had glorious visions of the day when they would “buy Mammy a cow,” and many were the talks and plans as to exactly what kind it should be. But nothing ever came their way, until this black chicken appeared right in the old kitchen, and all for Thanksgiving, too! That is, if they could keep him; for Polly and Ben, albeit the conflict within, conscientiously obeyed the commands of their mother and made inquiries far and near as to the ownership of Master Shanghai. Nobody knew anything of him, and he seemed indeed to have dropped down from the clouds. Clearly he was to remain at the Peppers’, and, as day after day passed by and they were not forced to give him up, their spirits rose, until the gayety over the future festival assumed the jolliest aspect. They already saw in imagination the glorious pie completed, and decking the festival board which Polly declared “must be trimmed with flowers.”