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 lowed in the garden and roamed the alfalfa and corn fields for their food. As they grew toward maturity sex divided them into two groups. The female turkeys kept together in a small, silent band and devoted themselves mainly to the business of eating, while their brothers preferred to loaf in the barnyard. A spot speckled with light and shade under a row of locust trees was their favorite promenade. With their tails spread fan-shape, their wing feathers scraping the ground, their heads and necks brilliantly blue and red and the little wormlike appendage above their beaks inflated and pendulous they would pace grandly up and down with a slow, dignified movement. The sun, striking along their satiny backs, made their feathers gleam with changing tints of rose, gold, green, and copper.

When they grew tired of the parade they loved to slip away and steal food that they knew was not intended for them. Aunt Eppie's grapes and peaches were their favorite tidbits. While feeding on these delicate morsels they talked to each other with little congratulatory gulps of delight like water gurgling out of the neck of a bottle. Then Judith would run and chase them out of the orchard, and they would all stretch out their necks at her and gobble together in indignant chorus.

It seemed a pity that so much beauty, pride, and joy in life should go to tempt the cloyed palate of some smug bishop or broker who had, compared with the soul that had lately animated the bit of white meat on his plate, but a poor notion of what it was to love, to play, and to enjoy the sun and the fruits of the earth.

"It's a shame fer folks to eat sech critters," Judith thought one blue September morning, as she watched the turkeys parade under the locust trees.

She had been slopping the pigs and was leaning on the railing of the hogpen looking at the turkeys beyond. A female turkey that had strayed from her sisters was among them and trying to make her escape. Each time that she made a move to go away, the young Toms for pure devilishness would intercept her by stepping in front of her, like a pack of village boys teasing a little girl. When she at last made her escape and flew