Mr. Allen’s enthusiasm in describing the beauties of the place, and Mercy’s enthusiasm in listening, were fast driving out of their minds the thought of the sale, which had been mentioned in the beginning of their conversation.  Mercy was the first to recall it.  She blushed and hesitated, as she said,—­

“But, Mr. Allen, we can’t go, you know, until I have sold this house.  Did you really want to buy it?  And how much do you think I ought to ask for it?”

“To be sure, to be sure!” exclaimed the young minister.  “Dear me, what children we are!  Mercy, I don’t honestly know what you ought to ask for the house.  I’ll find out.”

“Deacon Jones said he thought, taking in the cranberry meadow, it was worth three thousand dollars,” said Mercy; “but that seems a great deal to me:  though not in a good cranberry year, perhaps,” added she, ingenuously, “for last year the cranberries brought us in seventy-five dollars, besides paying for the picking.”

“And the meadow ought to go with the house, by all means,” said Mr. Allen.  “I want it for color in the background, when I look at the house as I come down from the meeting-house hill.  I wouldn’t like to have anybody else own the canvas on which the picture of my home will be oftenest painted for my eyes.  I’ll give you three thousand dollars for the house, Mercy.  I can only pay two thousand down, and pay you interest on the other thousand for a year or two.  I’ll soon clear it off.  Will that do?”

“Oh, thank you, thank you, Mr. Allen.  It will more than do,” said poor Mercy, who could not believe in such sudden good fortune; “but do you think you ought to buy it so quick?  Perhaps it wouldn’t bring so much money as that.  I had not asked anybody except Deacon Jones.”

Mr. Allen laughed.  “If you don’t look out for yourself sharper than this, Mercy,” he said, “in the new place ’where you’re going to live, you’ll fare badly.  Perhaps it may be true, as you say, that nobody else would give you three thousand dollars for the house, because nobody might happen to want to live in it.  But Deacon Jones knows better than anybody else the value of property here, and I am perfectly willing to give you the price he set on the place.  I had laid by this two thousand dollars towards my house; and I could not build such a house as this, to-day, for three thousand dollars.  But really, Mercy, you must look ’out for yourself better than this.”

“I don’t know,” replied Mercy, looking out of the window, with an earnest gaze, as if she were reading a writing a great way off,—­“I don’t know about that.  I doubt very much if looking out for one’s self, as you call it, is the best way to provide for one’s self.”