irl to learn as much as she
could about keeping a house nice before she had one of her own, and
Harriet blushed as red as a rose and thanked me, and arranged to come
for her first lesson the very next morning. I got a large gingham
apron for her, and we began. I gave her a lesson in bread-making that
very day, and found her an apt pupil. I told her that she would make
a very good housekeeper--I should not wonder if as good as Mrs.
Liscom, who was, I considered, the best in the village; and she
blushed again and kissed me.

Louisa and I had been a little worried as to what Mrs. Jameson would
say; but we need not have been. Mrs. Jameson was strenuously engaged
in uprooting poison-ivy vines, which grew thickly along the walls
everywhere in the village. I must say it seemed Scriptural to me, and
made me think better in one way of Mrs. Jameson, since it did require
considerable heroism.

Luckily, old Martin was one of the few who are exempt from the
noxious influence of poison-ivy, and he pulled up the roots with
impunity, but I must say without the best success. Poison-ivy is a
staunch and persistent thing, and more than a match for Mrs. Jameson.
She suffered herself somewhat in the conflict, and went about for
some time with her face and hands done up in castor-oil, which we
consider a sovereign remedy for poison-ivy. Cobb, too, was more or
less a victim to his mother's zeal for uprooting noxious weeds.

It was directly after the poison-ivy that Mrs. Jameson made what may
be considered her grand attempt of the season. All at once she
discovered what none of the rest of us had thought of--I suppose we
must have been lacking in public feeling not to have done so--that
our village had been settled exactly one hundred years ago that very
August.

Mrs. Jameson came into our house with the news on the twenty-seventh
day of July. She had just found it out in an old book which had been
left behind and forgotten in the garret of the Wray house.

"We must have a centennial, of course," said she magisterially.

Louisa and I stared at her. "A centennial!" said I feebly. I think
visions of Philadelphia, and exhibits of the products of the whole
world in our fields and cow-pastures, floated through my mind.
Centennial had a stupendous sound to me, and Louisa said afterward
it had to her.

"How would you make it?" asked Louisa vaguely of Mrs. Jameson, as if
a centennial were a loaf of gingerbread.

Mrs. Jameson had formed her