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 plans with the rapidity of a great
general on the eve of a forced battle. "We will take the oldest house
in town," said she promptly. "I think that it is nearly as old as the
village, and we will fit it up as nearly as possible like a house of
one hundred years ago, and we will hold our celebration there."
"Let me see, the oldest house is the Shaw house," said I.
"Why, Emily Shaw is living there," said Louisa in wonder.
"We shall make arrangements with her," returned Mrs. Jameson,
with confidence. She looked around our sitting-room, and eyed
our old-fashioned highboy, of which we are very proud, and an
old-fashioned table which becomes a chair when properly manipulated.
"Those will be just the things to go in one of the rooms," said she,
without so much as asking our leave.
"Emily Shaw's furniture will have to be put somewhere if so many
other things are to be moved in," suggested Louisa timidly; but Mrs.
Jameson dismissed that consideration with merely a wave of her hand.
"I think that Mrs. Simeon White has a swell-front bureau and an old
looking-glass which will do very well for one of the chambers," she
went on to say, "and Miss Clark has a mahogany table." Mrs. Jameson
went on calmly enumerating articles of old-fashioned furniture which
she had seen in our village houses which she considered suitable to
be used in the Shaw house for the centennial.
"I don't see how Emily Shaw is going to live there while all this is
going on," remarked Louisa in her usual deprecatory tone when
addressing Mrs. Jameson.
"I think we may be able to leave her one room," said Mrs. Jameson;
and Louisa and I fairly gasped when we reflected that Emily Shaw had
not yet heard a word of the plan.
"I don't know but Emily Shaw will put up with it, for she is pretty
meek," said Louisa when Mrs. Jameson had gone hurrying down the
street to impart her scheme to others; "but it is lucky for Mrs.
Jameson that Flora Clark hasn't the oldest house in town."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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