“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.”

I said I doubted if Flora would even consent to let her furniture be displayed in the centennial; but she did.  Everybody consented to everything.  I don’t know whether Mrs. H. Boardman Jameson had really any hypnotic influence over us, or whether we had a desire for the celebration, but the whole village marshalled and marched to her orders with the greatest docility.  All our cherished pieces of old furniture were loaded into carts and conveyed to the old Shaw house.