By Ella A. Drinkwater.
Most young people's Christmas commences the night before; so did Debby's. She had just settled down in Blanket street, and fallen into the sleep of tired, healthy girlhood, when she was aroused by her mother's irritable voice screaming up the stairway.
"Debby! Debby!" she called. "Get up quick and help me pick these turkeys. Your father's made up his mind to sell them dead weight, and we've got to pick them to-night, so he can take them to the hotel early in the morning. Do you hear me, Debby?"
"Yes, ma'am," answered Debby, scrambling out of her warm nest to the square of rag carpet before her bed.
Four minutes later she felt her way down-stairs and opened the kitchen door into a room filled with steam, and the peculiar smell of scalded fowls.
"There's seven to do," her mother said, bending over the brass kettle on the stove to draw from it a dripping turkey. "Yours are all scalded. Go to work."
Debby buttoned on a large apron, seated herself with a tin pan in her lap containing a turkey, and then began quickly to pluck off its feathers, laying them to dry on a religious newspaper spread on the table beside her.
Mrs. Blanchard soon sat down at the other side of the table, and began to pick and talk as fast as fingers and tongue would allow.
What did possess Mr. Blanchard to change his mind, and give them so much extra trouble, she could not conceive; and selling them to Tate, too, when he might have made a quarter of a cent more a pound if he had let Morris have them. And then those hoop-poles! He might have made she didn't know how much if he had taken her advice, and kept them a week longer.
As for the potatoes, they had turned out so small, and the corn was so short in the ear, that the land only knew where the money to get them all something to wear was to come from. Not that she cared for dress, for hadn't she worn the same bonnet and shawl to church until she was ashamed to show her face there? As for the sewing society, she was a master hand at cutting and planning, and she could go as well as not, too, now that Debby was quite old enough to take care of the baby, and get the supper ready for her father and the boys; but not a step was she going to sit next Mrs. Williams with her black silk, and Mrs. White with her handsome alpaca, although their husbands' farms were no larger than Mr. Blanchard's; and for the life of her she could not understand why she should not dress as well when she worked twice as hard as they did.