That went the rounds of the village.  Mrs. White was so sorry for the Jamesons in their dilemma of ignorance of our rural wisdom that she begged Sim to go over and persuade them that cows were created without teeth in their upper jaw, and that the cheating, if cheating there were, was done by Nature, and all men alike were victimized.  I suppose Mr. White must have convinced her, for they bought the cows; but it must have been a sore struggle for Mrs. Jameson at least to swallow instruction, for she had the confidence of an old farmer in all matters pertaining to a farm.

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