o be Mrs. Nathan Butters' basket. Mrs. Jameson
lifted out the great loaf of fruit cake and set it on the table
with a contemptuous thud, as it seemed to us; then she took out a
cranberry pie and a frosted apple pie, and set them beside it. She
opened Mrs. Peter Jones' basket next, and Mrs. Jones stood there
all full of nervous twitches and saw her take out a pile of ham
sandwiches and a loaf of chocolate cake and a bottle of pickles. She
went on opening the baskets and boxes one after another, and we stood
watching her. Finally she came to the pail full of jumbles, and her
hand slipped and the most of them fell to the ground and were a mass
of crumbles.

Then Mrs. Jameson spoke; she had not before said a word. "These are
enough to poison the whole village," said she, and she sniffed with
a proud uplifting of her nose.

I am sure that a little sound, something between a groan and a gasp,
came from us, but no one spoke. I felt that it was fortunate, and
yet I was almost sorry that Flora Clark, who made those jumbles, was
not there; she had gone to pick wild flowers with her Sunday-school
class. Flora is very high-spirited and very proud of her jumbles, and
I knew that she would not have stood it for a minute to hear them
called poison. There would certainly have been words then and there,
for Flora is afraid of nobody. She is a smart, handsome woman, and
would have been married long ago if it had not been for her temper.

Mrs. Jameson did not attempt to gather up the jumbles; she just went
on after that remark of hers, opening the rest of the things; there
were only one or two more. Then she took the cracker-box which Harry
had brought; he had stolen away to put up his horse, and it looked to
me very much as if Harriet had stolen away with him, for I could not
see her anywhere.

Mrs. Jameson lifted this cracker-box on to the table and opened it.
It was quite full of thick, hard-looking biscuits, or crackers. She
laid them in a pile beside the other things; then she took up the
basket and opened that. There was another kind of a cracker in that,
and two large papers of something. When everything was taken out she
pointed at the piles of eatables on the table, and addressed us:
"Ladies, attention!" rapping slightly with a spoon at the same time.
Her voice was very sweet, with a curious kind of forced sweetness:
"Ladies, attention! I wish you to carefully observe the food upon
the table before us. I wish you to consider