thrived: the same fingers would be gathering that.

Bordering this woods on one side lay a cornfield. The corn had just
been shucked, and beside each shock of fodder lay its heap of ears
ready for the gathering wagon. The sight of the corn brought freshly
to remembrance the red-ambered home-brew of the land which runs in a
genial torrent through all days and nights of the year--many a
full-throated rill--but never with so inundating a movement as at this
season. And the same grain suggested also the smokehouses of all
farms, in which larded porkers, fattened by it, had taken on
posthumous honors as home-cured hams; and in which up under the black
rafters home-made sausages were being smoked to their needed flavor
over well-chosen chips.

Around one heap of ears a flock of home-grown turkeys, red-mottled,
rainbow-necked, were feeding for their fate.

On the other side of the woods stretched a wheat-field, in the stubble
of which coveys of bob-whites were giving themselves final plumpness
for the table by picking up grains of wheat which had dropped into the
drills at harvest time or other seeds which had ripened in the autumn
aftermath.

Farther away on the landscape there was a hemp-field where
hemp-breakers were making a rattling reedy music; during these weeks
wagons loaded with the gold-bearing fibre begin to move creaking to
the towns, helping to fill the farmer's pockets with holiday largess.

Thus everything needed for Christmas was there in sight: the
mistletoe--the holly--the liquor of the land for the cups of hearty