I wuz goin' on nineteen when Caley was born." "Why, mother," exclaimed Mercy, "is it really so long ago?
Then my brother Caleb would be forty-six years old now!" and mercy took again in her hand the yellow ivory whistle, and ran her fingers over the faded and frayed pink ribbon, and looked at it with an indefinable sense of its being a strange link between her and a distant past, which, though she had never 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.