shared it, belonged to her by right. Hardly thinking what she did, she
raised the whistle to her lips, and blew a loud, shrill whistle on it. Her
mother started. "O Mercy, don't, don't!" she cried. "I can't bear to hear
it."

"Now, mother, don't you be foolish," said Mercy, cheerily. "A whistle's a
whistle, old or young, and made to be whistled with. We'll keep this to
amuse children with: you carry it in your pocket. Perhaps we shall meet
some children on the journey; and it'll be so nice for you to pop this out
of your pocket, and give it to them to blow."

"So it will, Mercy, I declare. That 'ud be real nice. You're a
master-piece for thinkin' o' things." And, easily diverted as a child, the
old woman dropped the whistle into her deep pocket, and, forgetting all
her tears, returned to her packing.

Not so Mercy. Having attained her end of cheering her mother, her own
thoughts reverted again and again all day long, and many times in after
years, whenever she saw the ivory whistle, to the strange picture of the
lonely old woman in the garret coming upon her first-born child's first
toy, lost for forty years; the picture, too, of the history of the quaint
piece of carving itself; the day it was slowly cut and chiselled by a
patient and ill-paid toiler in some city of China; its voyage in the
keeping of the ardent young husband hastening home to welcome his first
child; its forty years of silence and darkness in the old garret; and then
its return to life and light and sound, in the hands and lips of new
generations of children.

The journey which Mercy had so much dreaded was unexpectedly pleasant.
Mrs. Carr proved an admirable traveller with the exception of her