But they will fetch and carry their work by night, and no neighbor will ever by any chance surprise them with it in their hands.

Most beautifully is this surreptitious sewing done; there is no work in this country like it.

The tiny stitches bear the very aroma of sad and lonely leisure in them; a certain fine pride, too, as if the poverty-constrained lady would in no wise condescend to depart from her own standard in the matter of a single loop or stitch, no matter to what plebeian uses the garment might come after it should leave her hands.
Mercy's deep blush when she replied to her mother's astonished inquiry, how she could possibly earn any money, sprung from her consciousness of a secret,--a secret so harmless in itself, that she was ashamed of having any feeling of guilt in keeping it a secret; and yet, her fine and fastidious honesty so hated even the semblance of concealment, that the mere withholding of a fact, simply because she disliked to mention it, seemed to her akin to a denial of it.

If there is such a thing in a human being as organic honesty,--an honesty which makes a lie not difficult, but impossible, just as it is impossible for men to walk on ceilings like flies, or to breathe in water like fishes,--Mercy Philbrick had it.

The least approach to an equivocation was abhorrent to her: not that she reasoned about it, and submitting it to her conscience found it wicked, and therefore hateful; but that she disliked it instinctively,--as instinctively as she disliked pain.