Any one who has ever packed for a long journey, with an eager and excited child running up every minute with more and more cumbrous toys, dogs, cats, Noah's arks, and so on, to be put in among books and under-clothing, can imagine Mercy's despair at her mother's restless activity.
"Oh, mother, not in this box! Not in with the china!" would groan poor Mercy, as her mother appeared with armfuls of ancient relics from the garret, such as old umbrellas, bonnets, bundles of old newspapers, broken spinning-wheels, andirons, and rolls of remains of old wall-paper, the last of which had disappeared from the walls of the house, long before Mercy was born.

No old magpie was ever a more indiscriminate hoarder than Mrs.Carr had been; and, among all her hoardings, there was none more amusing than her hoarding of old wall-papers.

A scrap a foot square seemed to her too precious to throw away.

"It might be jest the right size to cover suthin' with," she would say; and, to do her justice, she did use in the course of a year a most unexampled amount of such fragments.

She had a mania for papering and repapering and papering again every shelf, every box, every corner she could get hold of.