our utter astonishment, up she marched to the nearest basket on the table and deliberately took off the cover and began taking out the contents.  It happened to be Mrs. Nathan Butters’ basket.  Mrs. Jameson lifted out the great loaf of fruit cake and set it on the table with a contemptuous thud, as it seemed to us; then she took out a cranberry pie and a frosted apple pie, and set them beside it.  She opened Mrs. Peter Jones’ basket next, and Mrs. Jones stood there all full of nervous twitches and saw her take out a pile of ham sandwiches and a loaf of chocolate cake and a bottle of pickles.  She went on opening the baskets and boxes one after another, and we stood watching her.  Finally she came to the pail full of jumbles, and her hand slipped and the most of them fell to the ground and were a mass of crumbles.

Then Mrs. Jameson spoke; she had not before said a word.  “These are enough to poison the whole village,” said she, and she sniffed with a proud uplifting of her nose.

I am sure that a little sound, something between a groan and a gasp, came from us, but no one spoke.  I felt that it was fortunate, and yet I was almost sorry that Flora Clark, who made those jumbles, was not there; she had gone to pick wild flowers with her Sunday-school class.  Flora is very high-spirited and very proud of her jumbles, and I knew that she would not have stood it for a minute to hear them called poison.  There would certainly have been words then and there, for Flora is afraid of nobody.  She is a smart, handsome woman, and would have been married long ago if it had not been for her temper.

Mrs. Jameson did not attempt to gather up the jumbles; she just went on after that remark of hers, opening the rest of the things; there were only one or two more.  Then she took the cracker-box which Harry had brought; he had stolen away to put up his horse, and it looked to me very much as if Harriet had stolen away with him, for I could not see her anywhere.

Mrs. Jameson lifted this cracker-box on to the table and opened it.  It was quite full of thick, hard-looking biscuits, or crackers.  She laid them in a pile beside the other things; then she took up the basket and opened that.  There was another kind of a cracker in that, and two large papers of something.  When everything was taken out she pointed at the piles of eatables on the table, and addressed us:  “Ladies, attention!” rapping slightly with a spoon at the same time.  Her voice was very sweet, with a curious kind of forced sweetness:  “Ladies, attention!  I wish you to carefully observe the food upon the table before us.  I wish you to consider it from the standpoint of wives and mothers of families.  There is the food which you have brought, unwholesome, indigestible; there is mine, approved of by the foremost physicians and men of science of the day.  For ten years I have had serious trouble with the alimentary canal, and this food has kept me in strength and vigor.  Had I