e could do without it. And Mr. James
Bowdoin looked in Jamie's eye, and held his peace. In those days
deference was rigidly exacted in the divers relations of life: a
disrespectful word would have caused McMurtagh's quick dismissal, and
the Bowdoins, father and son, would have been made miserable thereby.

"The lad must have his way with the little girl," said Mr. Bowdoin
(now promoted to that title by his father's recent death).

"It seems so," said Mr. James Bowdoin (our Mr. James), who by this
time had his own little girls to look after.

"Bring the poor child down to Nahant next time you come to spend the
day, and give her a chance to play with the children."

VII.

James McMurtagh, with "the old man" and "the mother," lived in a
curious little house on Salem Street, at the North End. Probably they
liked it because it might have been a little house in some provincial
town at home. To its growing defects of neighborhood they were
oblivious. It was a square two-story brick box: on the right of the
entry, the parlor, never used before, but now set apart for Mercedes;
behind, a larger square room, which was dining-room and kitchen
combined, and where the McMurtaghs, father and son, were wont to sit
in their shirt-sleeves after supper and smoke their pipes; above were
four tiny bedrooms.

Within the parlor the little lady, as Jamie already called her, was
given undisputed sway; and a strange transmogrification there she
made. The pink shells were collected from the mantel, and piled, with
others she had got, to represent a grotto, in one corner of the room;
the worked samplers were thought ugly, and banished upstairs. In
another corner was a sort of bower, made of bright-colored pieces of
stuff the child had begged from the neighbors, and called by her the
"Witch's Cave;" here little Mercedes loved to sit and tell the
fortunes of her friends. These were mostly Jamie's horny-handed
friends; the women neighbors took no part in all these doings, and
gave it out loudly that the child was being spoiled. She went, with
other boys and girls, to a small dame-school on the other side of
Bowdoin Square; for Jamie would not hear of a public school. Here she
learned quickly to read, write, and do a little embroidering, and
gained much knowledge of human nature.

One thing that they would not allow the child was her outlandish name:
Mercy she was called,--Mercy McMurtagh. Perhaps we may venture still
to call her Merc