about his
trousers until she herself began to think it was time to finish them;
and so when she found Miss Mason wasn't to be there, she had just
brought them along."

In spite of her uniform kindness, Mrs. Mason was regarded by some of
her neighbors as a bugbear, and this allusion to her immediately
turned the conversation in that direction.

"Now, do tell," said Widow Perkins, vigorously rapping her snuff-box
and passing it around. "Now, do tell if it's true that Miss Mason has
took a girl from the town-house?"

On being assured that such was the fact, she continued "Now I _will_
give up. Plagued as she is for things, what could have possessed her?"

"I was not aware that she was very much troubled to live," said Mrs.
Knight, whose way of thinking, and manner of expressing herself, was
entirely unlike Mrs. Perkins.

"Wall, she is," was Mrs. Perkins's reply; and then hitching her chair
closer to the group near her, and sinking her voice to a whisper, she
added, "You mustn't speak of it on any account, for I wouldn't have it
go from me, but my Sally Ann was over there t'other day, and neither
Miss Mason nor Judy was to home. Sally Ann has a sight of
curiosity,--I don't know nothing under the sun where she gets it, for
I hain't a mite,--Wall, as I was tellin' you, there was nobody to
home, and Sally Ann she slips down cellar and peeks into the pork
barrel, and as true as you live, there warn't a piece there. Now, when
country folks get out of salt pork, they are what I call middlin'
poor."

And Mrs. Perkins finished her speech with the largest pinch of
maccaboy she could possibly hold between her thumb and forefinger.

"Miss Perkins," said an old lady who was famous for occasionally
rubbing the widow down, "Miss Perkins, that's just as folks think.
It's no worse to be out of pork than 'tis to eat codfish the whole
durin' time."

This was a home thrust, for Mrs. Perkins, who always kept one or two
boarders, and among them the school-teacher was notorious for feeding
them on codfish.

Bridling up in a twinkling, her little gray eyes flashed fire as she
replied, "I s'pose it's me you mean, Miss Bates; but I guess I've a
right to eat what I'm a mind to. I only ask a dollar and ninepence a
week for boarding the school marm--"

"And makes money at that," whispered a rosy-cheeked girlish-looking
woman, who the summer before had been the "school-marm," and who now
bore the name of a thrifty young farmer.

Mrs. P