large
enough, you shall have two more. Don't tire yourself out: there's plenty
of time; and, if you don't get it all packed by the time I am done, I can
help you."

Then Mercy went downstairs feeling half-guilty, as one does when one has
practised a subterfuge on a child.

How many times that poor old woman packed and unpacked that box, nobody
could dream. All day long she trotted up and down, up and down; ransacking
closets, chests, barrels; sorting and resorting, and forgetting as fast as
she sorted. Now and then she would come across something which would rouse
an electric chain of memories in the dim chambers of her old, worn-out
brain, and she would sit motionless for a long time on the garret floor,
in a sort of trance. Once Mercy found her leaning back against a beam,
with her knees covered by a piece of faded blue Canton crape, on which her
eyes were fastened. She did not speak till Mercy touched her shoulder.

"Oh, my! how you scared me, child!" she exclaimed. "D'ye see this ere blue
stuff? I hed a gown o' thet once: it was drefful kind o' clingy stuff. I
never felt exzackly decent in it, somehow: it hung a good deal like a
night-gownd; but your father he bought it for the color. He traded off
some shells for it in some o' them furrin places. You wouldn't think it
now, but it used to be jest the color o' a robin's egg or a light-blue
'bachelor's button;' and your father he used to stick one o' them in my
belt whenever they was in blossom, when I hed the gownd on. He hed a heap
o' notions about things matchin'. He brought me that gownd the v'yage he
made jest afore Caleb was born; and I never hed a chance to wear it much,
the children come so fast. It warn't re'ly worn at all, 'n' I hed it dyed
black for veils arterwards."

It was from this father who used to "stick" pale-blue flowers in his
wife's belt, and whose love of delicate fabrics and tints made him
courageous enough to lead her draped in Canton crape into the unpainted
Cape Cod meeting-house, where her fellow-women bristled in homespun, that
Mercy inherited all the artistic side of her nature. She knew this
instinctively, and all her tenderest sentiment centred around the vague
memory she retained of a tall, dark-bearded man, who, when she was only
three years old, lifted her in his arms, called her his "little Mercy,"
and kissed her over and over again. She was most loyally affectionate to
her mother, but the sentiment was not a wholly filial one. T