“Wall, she is,” was Mrs. Perkins’s reply; and then hitching her chair closer to the group near her, and sinking her voice to a whisper, she added, “You mustn’t speak of it on any account, for I wouldn’t have it go from me, but my Sally Ann was over there t’other day, and neither Miss Mason nor Judy was to home.  Sally Ann has a sight of curiosity,—­I don’t know nothing under the sun where she gets it, for I hain’t a mite,—­Wall, as I was tellin’ you, there was nobody to home, and Sally Ann she slips down cellar and peeks into the pork barrel, and as true as you live, there warn’t a piece there.  Now, when country folks get out of salt pork, they are what I call middlin’ poor.”

And Mrs. Perkins finished her speech with the largest pinch of maccaboy she could possibly hold between her thumb and forefinger.

“Miss Perkins,” said an old lady who was famous for occasionally rubbing the widow down, “Miss Perkins, that’s just as folks think.  It’s no worse to be out of pork than ’tis to eat codfish the whole durin’ time.”

This was a home thrust, for Mrs. Perkins, who always kept one or two boarders, and among them the school-teacher was notorious for feeding them on codfish.

Bridling up in a twinkling, her little gray eyes flashed fire as she replied, “I s’pose it’s me you mean, Miss Bates; but I guess I’ve a right to eat what I’m a mind to.  I only ask a dollar and ninepence a week for boarding the school marm—­”

“And makes money at that,” whispered a rosy-cheeked girlish-looking woman, who the summer before had been the “school-marm,” and who now bore the name of a thrifty young farmer.

Mrs. Perkins, however, did not notice this interruption but proceeded with, “Yes, a dollar and ninepence is all I ever ask, and if I kept them so dreadful slim, I guess the committee man wouldn’t always come to me the first one.”

“Mrs. Perkins, here’s the pint,” said Mrs. Bates, dropping a stitch in her zeal to explain matters; “you see the cheaper they get the school-ma’am boarded, the further the money goes, and the longer school they have.  Don’t you understand it?”

Mrs. Knight, fancying that affairs were assuming altogether too formidable an aspect, adroitly turned the conversation upon the heroine of our story, saying how glad she was that Mary had at last found so good a home.

“So am I,” said Mrs. Bates; “for we all know that Mrs. Mason will take just as good care of her, as though she were her own; and she’s had a mighty hard time of it, knocked around there at the poor-house under Polly Grundy’s thumb.”

“They do say,” said Mrs. Perkins, whose anger had somewhat cooled, “They do say that Miss Grundy is mowing a wide swath over there, and really expects to have Mr. Parker, if his wife happens to die.”