ue. Mrs. Ketchum went to
sleep and snored, and told me on the way home that she did not mean
to be ungrateful, but she could not help feeling that it would have
been as improving for her to stay at home and read a new
Sunday-school book that she was interested in.

Mrs. Jameson did not confine herself in her efforts for our
improvement to our diet and our literary tastes. After she had us
fairly started in our bewildering career on the tracks of Bacon and
Shakespeare--doing a sort of amateur detective work in the tombs, as
it were--and after she had induced the storekeeper to lay in a supply
of health food--which he finally fed to the chickens--she turned
her attention to our costumes. She begged us to cut off our gowns
at least three inches around the bottoms, for wear when engaged
in domestic pursuits, and she tried to induce mothers to take off
the shoes and stockings of their small children, and let them run
barefoot. Children of a larger growth in our village quite generally
go barefoot in the summer, but the little ones are always, as a rule,
well shod. Mrs. Jameson said that it was much better for them also
to go without shoes and stockings, and Louisa and I were inclined
to think she might be right--it does seem to be the natural way of
things. But people rather resented her catching their children on the
street and stripping off their shoes and stockings, and sending the
little things home with them in their hands. However, their mothers
put on the shoes and stockings, and thought she must mean well. Very
few of them said anything to her by way of expostulation; but the
children finally ran when they saw her coming, so they would not have
their shoes and stockings taken off.

All this time, while Mrs. H. Boardman Jameson was striving to improve
us, her daughter Harriet was seemingly devoting all her energies to
the improvement of Harry Liscom, or to the improvement of her own
ideal in his heart, whichever it may have been; and I think she
succeeded in each case.

Neither Mrs. Liscom nor Mrs. Jameson seemed aware of it, but people
began to say that Harry Liscom and the eldest Jameson girl were going
together.

I had no doubt of it after what I had seen in the grove; and one
evening during the last of July I had additional evidence. In the
cool of the day I strolled down the road a little way, and finally
stopped at the old Wray house. Nobody lived there then; it had been
shut up for many a year. I thought