when she had been talking for a good hour about the coffin-plates,
declaring them to be grewsome and shocking, that, for her part, she
did not care for them, did not have one in her house--though every
one of her relations were dead, and she might have her walls covered
with them--but she believed in respecting those who did; and it
seemed to her that, however much anybody felt called upon to
interfere with the ways of the living, the relics of the dead should
be left alone. Flora concluded by saying that it seemed to her that
if the Linnville folks let Mrs. Jameson's bean-pots alone, she might
keep her hands off their coffin-plates.

Mrs. Jameson was quite unmoved even by that. She said that Miss Clark
did not realize, as she would do were her sphere wider, the
incalculable harm that such a false standard of art might do in a
community: that it might even pervert the morals.

"I guess if we don't have anything to hurt our morals any worse than
our coffin-plates, we shall do," returned Flora. She said afterward
that she felt just like digging up some of her own coffin-plates,
and having them framed and hung up, and asking Mrs. Jameson to tea.

All through June and a part of July Louisa and I had seen the
clandestine courtship between Harry Liscom and Harriet Jameson going
on. We could scarcely help it. We kept wondering why neither Caroline
Liscom nor Mrs. Jameson seemed aware of it. Of course, Mrs. Jameson
was so occupied with the village welfare that it might account for it
in her case, but we were surprised that Caroline was so blinded. We
both of us thought that she would be very much averse to the match,
from her well-known opinion of the Jamesons; and it proved that
she was. Everybody talked so much about Harry and his courtship of