That very night Mr. Allen wrote to Stephen; in two weeks, the whole matter was settled, and Mercy and her mother had set out on their journey.  They carried with them but one small valise.  The rest of their simple wardrobe had gone in boxes, with the furniture, by sailing vessel, to a city which was within three hours by rail of their new home.  This was the feature of the situation which poor Mrs. Carr could not accept.  In the bottom of her heart, she fully believed that they would never again see one of those boxes.  The contents of some which she had herself packed were of a most motley description.  In the beginning of the breaking up, while Mercy was at her wits’ end, with the unwonted perplexities of packing the whole belongings of a house, her mother had tormented her incessantly by bringing to her every few minutes some utterly incongruous and frequently worthless article, and begging her to put it in at once, whatever she might be packing.  Any one who has ever packed for a long journey, with an eager and excited child running up every minute with more and more cumbrous toys, dogs, cats, Noah’s arks, and so on, to be put in among books and under-clothing, can imagine Mercy’s despair at her mother’s restless activity.

“Oh, mother, not in this box!  Not in with the china!” would groan poor Mercy, as her mother appeared with armfuls of ancient relics from the garret, such as old umbrellas, bonnets, bundles of old newspapers, broken spinning-wheels, andirons, and rolls of remains of old wall-paper, the last of which had disappeared from the walls of the house, long before Mercy was born.  No old magpie was ever a more indiscriminate hoarder than Mrs. Carr had been; and, among all her hoardings, there was none more amusing than her hoarding of old wall-papers.  A scrap a foot square seemed to her too precious to throw away.  “It might be jest the right size to cover suthin’ with,” she would say; and, to do her justice, she did use in the course of a year a most unexampled amount of such fragments.  She had a mania for papering and repapering and papering again every shelf, every box, every corner she could get hold of.  The paste and brush were like toys to her; and she delighted in gay combinations, sticking on old bits of borders in fantastic ways, in most inappropriate situations.

“I do believe you’ll paper the pigsty next, mother,” said Mercy one day:  “there’s nothing left you can paper except that.”  Mrs. Carr took the suggestion in perfect good faith, and convulsed Mercy a few days later by entering the kitchen with the following extraordinary remark,—­

“I don’t believe it’s worth while to paper the pigsty.  I’ve been looking at it, and the boards they’re so rough, the paper wouldn’t lay smooth, anyhow; and I couldn’t well get at the inside o’ the roof, while the pig’s in.  It would look real neat, though.  I’d like to do it.”

Mercy endured her mother’s help in packing for one day.  Then the desperateness of the trouble suggested a remedy.  Selecting a large, strong box, she had it carried into the garret.