“This cannot be the first attack she has had,” said the doctor; and it was found afterward that Mercy had told Lizzy Hunter of her having twice had threatenings of a paralytic seizure.  “If only I die at once,” she had said to Lizzy, “I would rather go that way than in most others.  I dread the dying part of death.  I don’t want to know when I am going.”

And she did not.  All day her breathing grew slower and more labored, and at night it stopped.  In a few hours, there settled upon her features an expression of such perfect peace that each one who came to look at her stole away reverent and subdued.

The two old crones who had come to “lay out” the body crept about on tiptoe, their usual garrulity quenched by the sad and beautiful spectacle.  It was a singular thing that no one knew the name of the stranger who had died thus suddenly and alone.  In the confusion of their arrival, Mercy had omitted to register their names.  In the smaller White Mountain houses, this formality is not rigidly enforced.  And so it came to pass that this woman, so well known, so widely beloved, lay a night and a day dead, within a few hours’ journey of her home as unknown as if she had been cast up from a shipwrecked vessel on a strange shore.

The two old crones sat with the body all night and all the next day.  They sewed on the quaint garments in which it is still the custom of rural New England to robe the dead.  They put a cap of stiff white muslin over Mercy’s brown hair, which even now, in her fiftieth year, showed only here and there a silver thread.  They laid fine plaits of the same stiff white muslin over her breast, and crossed her hands above them.

“She must ha’ been a handsome woman in her time, Mis’ Bunker.  I ’spect she was married, don’t you?” said Ann Sweetser, Mrs. Bunker’s spinster cousin, who always helped her on these occasions.

“Well, this ere ring looks like it,” replied Mrs. Bunker, taking up a bit of the muslin and rubbing the broad gold band on the third finger of Mercy’s left hand.  “But yer can’t allers tell by that nowadays.  There’s folks wears ’em that ain’t married.  This is a real harndsome ring, ’s heavy ’s ever I see.”

How Mercy’s heart must have been touched, and also her fine and pathetic sense of humor, if her freed spirit hovered still in that little low-roofed room!  This cast-off garment of hers, so carefully honored, so curiously considered and speculated upon by these simple-minded people!  There was something rarely dramatic in all the surroundings of these last hours.  Among the guests in the house was one, a woman, herself a poet, who toward the end of the second day came into the chamber, bringing long trailing vines of the sweet Linnea, which was then in full bloom.  Her poet’s heart was moved to the depths by the thought of this unknown, dead woman lying there, tended by strangers’ hands.  She gazed with an inexplicable feeling of affection upon Mercy’s placid brow.  She lifted the lifeless hands and laid them down again in a less constrained position.  She, too, noted the broad gold ring, and said,—­