“Now, Mercy was of a fair countenance, and, therefore, all the more alluring.”  But her fair countenance was really no temptation to her.  “Sit still, my daughter,” said Naomi to Ruth in the Old Testament.  And it was entirely Mercy’s maidenly nature to sit still.  Even before she had come to her full womanhood under Christiana’s motherly care she would have been an example to Ruth.  Long ago, while Mercy was still a mere girl, when Mrs. Light-mind said something to her one day that made her blush, Mercy at last looked up in real anger and said, We women should be wooed; we were not made to woo.  And thus it was that all their time at the House Beautiful Mercy stayed close at home and worked with her needle and thread just as if she had been the plainest girl in all the town.  “I might have had husbands afore now,” she said, with a cast of her head over the coat that lay on her lap, “though I spake not of it to any.  But they were such as did not like my conditions, though never did any of them find fault with my person.  So they and I could not agree.”  Once Mercy’s mouth was opened on the subject of possible husbands it is a miracle that she did not go on in confidence to name some of the husbands she might have had.  Mercy was too truthful and too honourable a maiden to have said even on that subject what she did say if it had not been true.  No doubt she believed it true.  And the belief so long as she mentioned no names, did not break any man’s bones and did not spoil any man’s market.  Don’t set up too prudishly and say that it is a pity that Mercy so far forgot herself as to make her little confidential boast.  We would not have had her without that little boast.  Keep-at-home, sit-still, hats and hosen and all—­her little boast only proves Mercy to have been at heart a true daughter of Eve after all.

There is an old-fashioned word that comes up again and again in the account of Mr. Brisk’s courtship,—­a word that contains far more interest and instruction for us than might on the surface appear.  When Mr. Brisk was rallied upon his ill-success with Mercy, he was wont to say that undoubtedly Mistress Mercy was a very pretty lass, only she was troubled with ill conditions.  And then, when Mercy was confiding to Prudence all about her possible husbands, she said that they were all such as did not like her conditions.  To which Prudence, keeping her countenance, replied, that the men were but few in their day that could abide the practice that was set forth by such conditions as those of Mercy.  Well, tossed out Mercy, if nobody will have me I will die a maid, or my conditions shall be to me as a husband!  As I came again and again across that old seventeenth-century word “conditions,” I said to myself, I feel sure that Dr. Murray of the Oxford Scriptorium will have noted this striking passage.  And on turning up the Sixth Part of the New English Dictionary, there, to be sure, was the old word standing in this