She, however, did listen readily to one singular piece of information
which brought much ridicule upon them. She chanced to say to Wilson
Gregg, who is something of a wag, and had just sold the Jamesons a
nice little white pig, that she thought that ham was very nice in
alternate streaks of fat and lean, though she never ate it herself,
and only bought the pig for the sake of her mother, who had
old-fashioned tastes in her eating and would have pork, and she
thought that home-raised would be so much healthier.

"Why, bless you, ma'am," said he, "if you want your ham streaky all
you have to do is to feed the pig one day and starve him the next."

The Jamesons tried this ingenious plan; then, luckily for the pig,
old Jonas, who had chuckled over it for a while, revealed the fraud
and put him on regular rations.

I suppose the performance of the Jamesons which amused the village
the most was setting their hens on hard-boiled eggs for sanitary
reasons. That seemed incredible to me at first, but we had it on good
authority--that of Hannah Bell, a farmer's daughter from the West
Corners, who worked for the Jamesons. She declared that she told Mrs.
Jameson that hens could not set to any purpose on boiled eggs; but
Mrs. Jameson had said firmly that they must set upon them or none
at all; that she would not have eggs about the premises so long
otherwise; she did not consider it sanitary. Finally, when the eggs
would not hatch submitted to such treatment, even at her command, she
was forced to abandon her position, though even then with conditions
of her surrender to Nature. She caused the nests to be well soaked
with disinfectants.

The Jamesons shut the house up the last of October and went back to
the city, and I think most of us were sorry. I was, and Louisa said
that she missed them.

Mrs. Jameson had not been what we call neighborly through the summer,
when she lived in the next house. Indeed, I think she never went into
any of the village houses in quite a friendly and equal way, as we
visit one another. Generally she came either with a view toward
improving us--on an errand of mercy as it were, which some
resented--or else upon some matter of business. Still we had, after
all, a kindly feeling for her, and especially for Grandma Cobb and
the girls, and the little meek boy. Grandma Cobb had certainly
visited us, and none of us were clever enough to find out whether it
was with a patronizing spirit or not. The extrem