For what possible reason it slowed up on approaching the freight-car nobody ever knew; but the fact remains that it did, just as Jericho Bob laid his wicked black paw on the turkey's tail.
The turkey shrieked, spread his wings, shook the small black boy's grasp from his tail, and with a mighty swoop alighted on the roof of the very last car as it passed; and in a moment more Jericho Bob's Thanksgiving dinner had vanished, like a beautiful dream, down the road!
What became of that Thanksgiving dinner no one ever knew. If you happen to meet a traveling turkey without any luggage, but with a smile on his countenance, please send word to Jericho Bob.
Every evening he and Julius Cæsar Fish stand by the broken-down fence and look up and down the road, as if they expected some one.
Jericho Bob has a turn-up nose and bow-legs. Julius Cæsar still wears his dress-coat, and both are watching for a Thanksgiving dinner that ran away.
HOW WE BOUGHT LOUISIANA
BY HELEN LOCKWOOD COFFIN
It is a hard matter to tell just how much power a little thing has, because little things have the habit of growing. That was the trouble that France and England and Spain and all the other big nations had with America at first. The thirteen colonies occupied so small and unimportant a strip of land that few people thought they would ever amount to much. How could such insignificance ever bother old England, for instance, big and powerful as she was? To England's great loss she soon learned her error in underestimating the importance or strength of her colonies.
France watched the giant and the pygmy fighting together, and learned several lessons while she was watching. For one thing, she found out that the little American colonies were going to grow, and so she said to herself: "I will be a sort of back-stop to them. These Americans are going to be foolish over this bit of success, and think that just because they have won the Revolution they can do anything they wish to do. They'll think they can spread out all over this country and grow to be as big as England herself; and of course anybody can see that that is impossible. I'll just put up a net along the Mississippi River, and prevent them crossing over it. That will be the only way to keep them within bounds."