m to
join the party. She was thus left alone in a house crowded with people,
all of whom were strangers to her. Some of them recollected afterward to
have noticed her sitting on the piazza at sunset, looking at the mountains
with an expression of great delight; but no one spoke with her, and no one
missed her the next morning, when she did not come to breakfast. Late in
the forenoon, the landlady came running in great terror and excitement to
one of the guests, exclaiming: "That lady that came yesterday is dying.
The chambermaids could not get into her room, nor get any answer, so we
broke open the door. The doctor says she'll never come to again!"

Helpless, the village doctor, and the servants, and the landlady, and as
many of the guests as could crowd into the little room, stood around
Mercy's bed. It seemed a sad way to die, surrounded by strangers, who did
not even know her name; but Mercy was unconscious. It made no difference
to her. Her heavy breathing told only too well the nature of the trouble.

"This cannot be the first attack she has had," said the doctor; and it was
found afterward that Mercy had told Lizzy Hunter of her having twice had
threatenings of a paralytic seizure. "If only I die at once," she had said
to Lizzy, "I would rather go that way than in most others. I dread the
dying part of death. I don't want to know when I am going."

And she did not. All day her breathing grew slower and more labored, and
at night it stopped. In a few hours, there settled upon her features an
expression of such perfect peace that each one who came to look at her
stole away reverent and subdued.

The two old crones who had come to "lay out" the body crept about on
tiptoe, their usual garrulity quenched by the sad and beautiful spectacle.
It was a singular thing that no one knew the name of the stranger who had
died thus suddenly and alone. In the confusion of their arrival, Mercy
had omitted to register their names. In the smaller White Mountain houses,
this formality is not rigidly enforced. And so it came to pass that this
woman, so well known, so widely beloved, lay a night and a day dead,
within a few hours' journey of her home as unknown as if she had been cast
up from a shipwrecked vessel on a strange shore.

The two old crones sat with the body all night and all the next day. They
sewed on the quaint garments in which it is still the custom of rural New
England to robe the dead. They put a cap of stiff whit