was supposed to draw the custom of all owners of dogs to “John Locker, harness-maker.”  There was a barber’s pole, and an apothecary’s shop with the conventional globes of mysterious crimson and blue liquids in the window; and, to complete the list of the decorations of this fantastic front, there had been painted many years ago, high up on the wall, in large and irregular letters, the sign stretching out over two-thirds of the row, “Miss Orra White’s Seminary for Young Ladies.”  Miss Orra White had been dead for several years; and the hall in which she had taught her school, having passed through many successive stages of degradation in its uses, had come at last to be a lumber-room, from which had arisen many a waggish saying as to the similarity between its first estate and its last.

On the other side of the common, opposite the hotel, was a row of dwelling-houses, which owing to the steep descent had a sunken look, as if they were slipping into their own cellars.  The grass was too green in their yards, and the thick, matted plantain-leaves grew on both edges of the sodden sidewalk.

“Oh, dear,” thought Mercy to herself, “I am sure I hope our house is not there.”  Then she stepped down from the high piazza, and stood for a moment on the open space, looking up toward the north.  She could only see for a short distance up the winding road.  A high, wood-crowned summit rose beyond the houses, which seemed to be built higher and higher on the slope, and to be much surrounded by trees.  A street led off to the west also:  this was more thickly built up.  To the south, there was again a slight depression; and the houses, although of a better order than those on the eastern side of the common, had somewhat of the same sunken air.  Mercy’s heart turned to the north with a sudden and instinctive recognition.  “I am sure that is the right part of the town for mother,” she said.  “If Mr. White’s house is down in that hollow, we’ll not live in it long.”  She was so absorbed in her study of the place, and in her conjectures as to their home, that she did not realize that she herself was no ordinary sight in that street:  a slight, almost girlish figure, in a plain, straight, black gown like a nun’s, with one narrow fold of transparent white at her throat, tied carelessly by long floating ends of black ribbon; her wavy brown hair blown about her eyes by the wind, her cheeks flushed with the keen air, and her eyes bright with excitement.  Mercy could not be called even a pretty woman; but she had times and seasons of looking beautiful, and this was one of them.  The hostler, who was rubbing down his horses in the door of the barn, came out wide-mouthed, and exclaimed under his breath,—­

“Gosh! who’s she?” with an emphasis on that feminine, personal pronoun which was all the bitterer slur on the rest of womankind in that neighborhood, that he was so unconscious of the reflection it conveyed.  The cook and the stable-boy also came running to the kitchen door, on hearing the hostler’s exclamation; and they, too, stood gazing at the unconscious Mercy, and each, in their own way, paying tribute to her appearance.