Stuffy Pete took his seat on the third bench to the right as you
enter Union Square from the east, at the walk opposite the fountain.
Every Thanksgiving Day for nine years he had taken his seat there
promptly at 1 o'clock. For every time he had done so things had
happened to him--Charles Dickensy things that swelled his waistcoat
above his heart, and equally on the other side.

But to-day Stuffy Pete's appearance at the annual trysting place
seemed to have been rather the result of habit than of the yearly
hunger which, as the philanthropists seem to think, afflicts the
poor at such extended intervals.

Certainly Pete was not hungry. He had just come from a feast
that had left him of his powers barely those of respiration and
locomotion. His eyes were like two pale gooseberries firmly imbedded
in a swollen and gravy-smeared mask of putty. His breath came
in short wheezes; a senatorial roll of adipose tissue denied a
fashionable set to his upturned coat collar. Buttons that had been
sewed upon his clothes by kind Salvation fingers a week before flew
like popcorn, strewing the earth around him. Ragged he was, with a
split shirt front open to the wishbone; but the November breeze,
carrying fine snowflakes, brought him only a grateful coolness.
For Stuffy Pete was overcharged with the caloric produced by a
super-bountiful dinner, beginning with oysters and ending with plum
pudding, and including (it seemed to him) all the roast turkey and
baked potatoes and chicken salad and squash pie and ice cream in
the world. Wherefore he sat, gorged, and gazed upon the world with
after-dinner contempt.