to go to see what was going on, and yet listened to Tommy Gregg’s report, which was not, I suppose, to our credit.  I have often thought that punctilious people will use cats’-paws to gratify curiosity when they would scorn to use them for anything else.  Still, neither Louisa nor I would have actually beckoned Tommy Gregg up to the door, as Mrs. Jones did, though I suppose we had as much cause to be ashamed, for we certainly listened full as greedily as she.

It seemed to me that Tommy had seen all the furniture unpacked, and much of it set up, by lurking around in the silent, shrinking, bright-eyed fashion that he has.  Tommy Gregg is so single-minded in his investigations that I can easily imagine that he might seem as impersonal as an observant ray of sunlight in the window.  Anyway, he had evidently seen everything, and nobody had tried to stop him.

“It ain’t very handsome,” said Tommy Gregg with a kind of disappointment and wonder.  “There ain’t no carpets in the house except in Grandma Cobb’s room, and that’s jest straw mattin’; and there’s some plain mats without no roses on ’em; and there ain’t no stove ’cept in the kitchen; just old andirons like mother keeps up garret; and there ain’t no stuffed furniture at all; and they was eatin’ supper without no table-cloth.”

Amelia Powers and Mrs. Jones thought that it was very singular that the Jamesons had no stuffed furniture, but Louisa and I did not feel so.  We had often wished that we could afford to change the haircloth furniture, which I had had when I was married, for some pretty rattan or plain wood chairs.  Louisa and I rather fancied the Jamesons’ style of house-furnishing when we call there.  It was rather odd, certainly, from our village standpoint, and we were not accustomed to see bare floors if people could possibly buy a carpet; the floors were pretty rough in the old house, too.  It did look as if some of the furniture was sliding down-hill, and it was quite a steep descent from the windows to the chimney in all the rooms.  Of course, a carpet would have taken off something of that effect.  Another thing struck us as odd, and really scandalized the village at large:  the Jamesons had taken down every closet and cupboard door in the house.  They had hung curtains before the clothes-closets, but the shelves of the pantry which opened out of the dining-room, and the china-closet in the parlor, were quite exposed, and furnished with, to us, a very queer assortment of dishes.  The Jamesons had not one complete set, and very few pieces alike.  They had simply ransacked the neighborhood for forsaken bits of crockery-ware, the remnants of old wedding-sets which had been long stored away on top shelves, or used for baking or preserving purposes.