preference of football to prayer and praise on Thanksgiving-day has gone
so far that now a principal church in the city holds its services on
Thanksgiving-eve, so that the worshippers may not be tempted to keep away
from their favorite game.

There is always a heavy dinner at home after the game, to console the
friends of those who have lost and to heighten the joy of the winning
side, among the comfortable people. The poor recognize the day largely
as a sort of carnival. They go about in masquerade on the eastern
avenues, and the children of the foreign races who populate that quarter
penetrate the better streets, blowing horns and begging of the passers.
They have probably no more sense of its difference from the old carnival
of Catholic Europe than from the still older Saturnalia of pagan times.
Perhaps you will say that a masquerade is no more pagan than a football
game; and I confess that I have a pleasure in that innocent
misapprehension of the holiday on the East Side. I am not more censorious
of it than I am of the displays of festival cheer at the provision-stores
or green-groceries throughout the city at this time. They are almost as
numerous on the avenues as the drinking-saloons, and, thanks to them, the
tasteful housekeeping is at least convenient in a high degree. The waste
is inevitable with the system of separate kitchens, and it is not in
provisions alone, but in labor and in time, a hundred cooks doing the
work of one; but the Americans have no conception of our co-operative
housekeeping, and so the folly goes on.

Meantime the provision-stores add much to their effect of crazy gayety on
the avenues. The variety and harmony of colors is very great, and this
morning I stood so long admiring the arrangement in one of them that I am
afraid I rendered myself a little suspicious to the policeman guarding
the liquor-store on the nearest corner; there seems always to be a