The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Jamesons, by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

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Title: The Jamesons

Author: Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

Release Date: February 19, 2006 [EBook #17792]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE JAMESONS ***

Produced by Jeff Kaylin and Andrew Sly

The Jamesons

by

Mary E. Wilkins

Author of "A Humble Romance,"
"A New England Nun,"
"Pembroke," "The People of Our
Neighborhood," etc.

with pictures

New York
Doubleday & McClure Company
Philadelphia
Curtis Publishing Company
1899

I

THEY ARRIVE

Until that summer nobody in our village had ever taken boarders.
There had been no real necessity for it, and we had always been
rather proud of the fact. While we were certainly not rich--there was
not one positively rich family among us--we were comfortably provided
with all the necessities of life. We did not need to open our houses,
and our closets, and our bureau drawers, and give the freedom of our
domestic hearths, and, as it were, our household gods for playthings,
to strangers and their children.

Many of us had to work for our daily bread, but, we were thankful to
say, not in that way. We prided ourselves because there was no summer
hotel with a demoralizing bowling-alley, and one of those dangerous
chutes, in our village. We felt forbiddingly calm and superior when
now and then some strange city people from Grover, the large summer
resort six miles from us, travelled up and down our main street
seeking board in vain. We plumed ourselves upon our reputation of not
taking boarders for love or money.

Nobody had dreamed that there was to be a break at last in our
long-established custom, and nobody dreamed that the break was to
be made in such a quarter. One of the most well-to-do, if not the
most well-to-do, of us all, took the first boarders ever taken in
Linnville. When Amelia Powers heard of it she said, "Them that
has, gits."

On the afternoon of the first day of June, six years ago, I was
sewing at my sitting-room window. I was making a white muslin dress
for little Alice, my niece, to wear to the Seventeenth-of-June
pic