e, and strange sounds were heard in and behind the piles of rubbish,
as if all sorts of small animals might be skurrying about, and giving
alarms to each other.

Mercy stood still on the threshold, her face full of astonishment. The
dust made her cough; and at first she could hardly see which way to step.
The old man threw down his cane, and ran swiftly from corner to corner,
and pile to pile, peering around, pulling out first one thing and then
another. He darted from spot to spot, bending lower and lower, as he grew
more impatient in his search, till he looked like a sort of human weasel
gliding about in quest of prey.

"Trash, trash, nothin' but trash!" he muttered to himself as he ran. "Burn
it up some day. Trash, trash!"

"How did you get all these queer things together, Mr. Wheeler?" Mercy
ventured to say at last "Did you keep a store?"

The old man did not reply. He was tugging away at a high stack of rolls of
undressed leather, which reached to the ceiling in one corner. He pulled
them too hastily, and the whole stack tumbled forward, and rolled heavily
in all directions, raising a suffocating dust, through which the old man's
figure seemed to loom up as through a fog, as he skipped to the right and
left to escape the rolling bales.

"O Mr. Wheeler!" cried Mercy, "are you hurt?"

He laughed a choked laugh, more like a chuckle than like a laugh.

"He! he! child. Dust don't hurt me. Goin' to return to 't presently. Made
on 't! made on 't! Don't see why folks need be so 'fraid on 't! He! he! 'T
is pretty choky, though." And he sat down on one of the leather rolls, and
held his sides through a hard coughing fit. As the dust slowly subsided,
Mercy saw standing far back in the corner, where the bales of leather had
hidden it, an old-fashioned clock, so like her own that she gave a low cry
of surprise.

"Oh, is that the clock you meant, Mr. Wheeler?" she exclaimed.

"Yes, yes, that's it. Nice old clock. Took it for debt. Cost me more'n
't's wuth. As fur that matter, 'tain't wuth nothin' to me. Wouldn't hev it
in the house 'n' more than I'd git the town 'us tower in for a clock. D'ye
like it, child? Ye can hev it's well's not. I'd like to give it to ye."

"I should like it very much, very much indeed," replied Mercy. "But I
really cannot think of taking it, unless you let us pay for it."

The old man sprung to his feet with such impatience that the leather bale
rolled away from him, and he nearly lost his bal