e part of the city. We knew that they had always spent
their summers at their own place at the seashore, and that this was
the first season of their sojourn in a little country village in a
plain house. We knew how hard a struggle it had been for them to
come here; we knew just how much they paid for their board, how Mrs.
Jameson never wanted anything for breakfast but an egg and a hygienic
biscuit, and had health food in the middle of the forenoon and
afternoon.

We also knew just how old they all were, and how the H. in Mr.
Jameson's name stood for Hiram. We knew that Mrs. Jameson had never
liked the name--might, in fact, have refused to marry on that score
had not Grandma Cobb reasoned with her and told her that he was a
worthy man with money, and she not as young as she had been; and how
she compromised by always using the abbreviation, both in writing and
speaking. "She always calls him H," said Grandma Cobb, "and I tell
her sometimes it doesn't look quite respectful to speak to her
husband as if he were part of the alphabet." Grandma Cobb, if the
truth had been told, was always in a state of covert rebellion
against her daughter.

Grandma Cobb was always dressed in a black silk gown which seemed
sumptuous to the women of our village. They could scarcely reconcile
it with the statement that the Jamesons had lost their money. Black
silk of a morning was stupendous to them, when they reflected how
they had, at the utmost, but one black silk, and that guarded as if
it were cloth of gold, worn only upon the grandest occasions, and
designed, as they knew in their secret hearts, though they did not
proclaim it, for their last garment of earth. Grandma Cobb always
wore a fine lace cap also, which should, according to the opinions of
the other old ladies of the village, have been kept sacred for other
women's weddings or her own funeral. She used her best gold-bowed
spectacles every day, and was always leaving them behind her in the
village houses, and little Tommy or Annie had to run after her with
a charge not to lose them, for nobody knew how much they cost.

Grandma Cobb always carried about with her a paper-covered novel and
a box of cream peppermints. She ate the peppermints and freely
bestowed them upon others; the novel she never read. She said quite
openly that she only carried it about to please her daughter, who had
literary tastes. "She belongs to a Shakespeare Club, and a Browning
Club, and a Current Lite