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.