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 incessant and garrulous anxiety about the boxes which had been left behind on the deck of the schooner "Maria Jane," and could not by any possibility overtake them for three weeks to come.

She was, in fact, so much of a child that she was in a state of eager delight at every new scene and person.

Her childishness proved the best of claims upon every one's courtesy.

Everybody was ready to help "that poor sweet old woman;" and she was so simply and touchingly grateful for the smallest kindness that everybody who had helped her once wanted to help her again.

More than one of their fellow-travellers remembered for a long time the bright-faced young woman with her childish mother, and wondered where they could have been going, and what was to be their life.
On the fourth day, just as the sun was sinking behind the hills, they entered the beautiful river interval, through which the road to their new home lay.