staunch and persistent thing, and more than a match for Mrs. Jameson.
She suffered herself somewhat in the conflict, and went about for
some time with her face and hands done up in castor-oil, which we
consider a sovereign remedy for poison-ivy. Cobb, too, was more or
less a victim to his mother's zeal for uprooting noxious weeds.

It was directly after the poison-ivy that Mrs. Jameson made what may
be considered her grand attempt of the season. All at once she
discovered what none of the rest of us had thought of--I suppose we
must have been lacking in public feeling not to have done so--that
our village had been settled exactly one hundred years ago that very
August.

Mrs. Jameson came into our house with the news on the twenty-seventh
day of July. She had just found it out in an old book which had been
left behind and forgotten in the garret of the Wray house.

"We must have a centennial, of course," said she magisterially.

Louisa and I stared at her. "A centennial!" said I feebly. I think
visions of Philadelphia, and exhibits of the products of the whole
world in our fields and cow-pastures, floated through my mind.
Centennial had a stupendous sound to me, and Louisa said afterward
it had to her.

"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