Newspaper Clipping of the Thanksgiving Day

Via Newspapers.com

Just a little Thanksgiving enigma from days gone by, courtesy of the “Daily Florida Citizen,” December 11, 1895:

From the New York Sun. 

Just beyond the curve where the upbound Sixth-Avenue trains swing into West Third Street stands a three-story frame house. It is one of very few remnants of the early growth of the city in that district. Weather-beaten, paintless, and rotten from age, it shivers with the fear of falling in ruins whenever a train rumbles past. Almost on a level with the track is a queer dormer window with a dappling half curtain which in turn conceals the interior; a shadowy room furnished with a couple of rack-jointed chairs, washstand, and a cot, evidently somebody's home. Thousands of people traveling up and down town must have noticed that room, its ancient bareness open to the gaze. 

The occupant probably works all day and goes to bed in the dark. No one is to be seen in that room during the sunlight hours, and the window darkens with the setting sun. For reasons easily to be guessed from the nature of the curtain, the inmate of the room would not care to light up when retiring. Open as the room is to the public view, as a home it is a sealed secret, or was until last week. Then a sign appeared in the ancient window: 

One of the thousands who at one time or another looked in the window as the train slowed up for the curve is a Wall Street broker, who every afternoon at little after 4 takes the elevated at Rector Street, and rides to his home up town. Being fond of fresh air, he frequently rides on the platform, and because he is wide of eye and open of mind and imagination he spends his traveling hours taking an interest in what he sees. The old frame house with its quaint window had appealed to him for one reason, because his boyhood had thrived on the air that wafted in with the odor of apple bloom or sharp through just such a window, heavy with the odor of apple bloom or sharp with the frost of a merry Christmas and a frozen one. Then, too, the house and its neighbors were a little cluster of the slums, such as he saw nowhere else in his busy life, for there are slums in West Third Street as wretched and as wicked as any in New York. So he glanced into the window frequently as the train rattled past, and wondered who called the dark attic closet on the other side of it a home, until, with constant speculation, fortified by never a sight of life within, he came to regard it as a deserted bit in the midst of the teeming streets.  It was quite a shock to him, therefore, when the big sign appeared in the window. A personality had suddenly invaded his desert. 

The next morning, coming down on the train. a banker friend of his asked him if he had ever noticed that queer little house around the Third-Street curve.

"How do you know about it?" demanded the broker, with a feeling that he had been divested of his proprietary interest.

“One might suppose you owned that house from your tone,” said the banker. "I've had my eye on that window long before you ever saw it." 

"Nonsense." retorted the other, and they were still discussing it when two more Wall-Street men got aboard and joined in. Both of them had peeked through the little dormer window, as they confessed. and had frequently wondered who lived inside. Before the train reached Third Street there were seven financiers exchanging notes about the place, and all seven read the sign again as they rolled by. 

"Contributions received? Why shouldn't we contribute?" demanded the banker of his companions after the curve had hid the house from their view. It was all decided in a short time. The consensus of opinion was that $15 ought to buy a very good Thanksgiving dinner, so they put in $2 apiece and drew lots to see who should pay the odd dollar. On the day before Thanksgiving they were to go up together in the train, and the man who used to be a college baseball pitcher was to toss the money, tied up in a silk handkerchief, into the window. It was the suggestion of one of the younger members of the syndicate that a note be enclosed hinting that the beneficiary, by appearing at the window at 4:30 on the day after Thanksgiving and watching for the elevated train, might have the opportunity to thank the contributors.  This, he pointed out,  would show them what the inmate of that mysterious room was. In vain, did the broker object on the ground that he didn't want his mystery spoiled. 

"Probably it's a professional beggar," he said.

"Or a frizzled old maid," suggested the banker. 

“Or a practical joke."

“I believe it's a young and beautiful maiden wrongly restrained from her liberty and the princely family estate at Hohokus by the machinations of the false and dyed-in-the-wool-(meaning the mustache) villain who is keeping her in seclusion and trying to bully her into marrying him,” asseverated the junior member. “Anyway, I think we've a right to find out.”

They met on the day before Thanksgiving and went up on the train. The ex-pitcher, who had been practicing with bean bags in his front hall, hurled the packet true and straight in at the window as the train went by. Was it with the eye of imagination that the junior member saw a glint of golden hair in the ray of light that pierced the room? The banker said it was, adding reflections as to the unwisdom of hitting the wassail bowl before dinner.

Nevertheless, this rumor added to the eagerness with which the seven awaited the time set for the solving of the mystery. On the following Friday at 4:30 the platform of the up-bound elevated train carried seven Wall-Street men who took up so much room that the guard was fain to step inside. As the train neared the curve they pressed forward. The car turned, swung, and then there was a long, low whistle from the broker, and a long, low silence from the rest. In the window, hanging by its neck, was the clean-picked skeleton of a huge turkey bearing on its mighty breastbone a placard inscribed:

The mystery was unsolved. The junior member of the syndicate, who doesn't really believe that Sherlock Holmes is dead at all, is going to advertise him to come over here and see about it.