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. There was too
much reversal of the natural order of the protector and the protected in
it; and her life was on too different a plane of thought, feeling, and
interest from the life of the uncultured, undeveloped, childish, old
woman. Yet no one who saw them together would have detected any trace of
this shortcoming in Mercy's feeling towards her mother. She had in her
nature a fine and lofty fibre of loyalty which could never condescend even
to parley with a thought derogatory to its object; was lifted above all
consciousness of the possibility of any other course. This is a sort of
organic integrity of affection, which is to those who receive it a tower
of strength, that is impregnable to all assault except that of death
itself. It is a rare type of love, the best the world knows; but the men
and the women whose hearts are capable of it are often thought not to be
of a loving nature. The cheaper and less lasting types of love are so much
louder of voice and readier of phrase, as in cloths cheap fabrics, poor to
wear, are often found printed in gay colors and big patterns.

The day before they left home, Mercy, becoming alarmed by a longer
interval than usual without any sound from the garret, where her mother
was still at work over her fantastic collections of old odds and ends, ran
up to see what it meant.

Mrs. Carr was on her knees before a barrel, which had held rags and