blow it ez loud ez I could.  And his father he’d just lay back ’n his chair, and laugh ‘n’ laugh, ‘n’ call out, ’Blow away, my hearty!’ Oh, my! it don’t seem any longer ago’n yesterday.  I wish I’d ha’ known.  I wa’n’t never friends with Patience any more arter that.  I never misgave me but what she’d got the whistle.  It was such a curious cut thing, and cost a heap o’ money.  Your father wouldn’t never tell what he gin for ’t.  Oh, my! it don’t seem any longer ago ’n yesterday,” and the old woman wiped her eyes on her apron, and struggling up on her feet took the whistle again from Mercy’s hands.

“How old would my brother Caley be now, if he had lived, mother?” said Mercy, anxious to bring her mother gently back to the present.

“Well, let me see, child.  Why, Caley—­Caley, he’d be—­How old am I, Mercy?  Dear me! hain’t I lost my memory, sure enough, except about these ere old things?  They seem’s clear’s daylight.”

“Sixty-five last July, mother,” said Mercy.  “Don’t you know I gave you your new specs then?”

“Oh, yes, child,—­yes.  Well, I’m sixty-five, be I?  Then Caley,—­Caley, he’d be, let me see—­you reckon it, Mercy.  I wuz goin’ on nineteen when Caley was born.”

“Why, mother,” exclaimed Mercy, “is it really so long ago?  Then my brother Caleb would be forty-six years old now!” and mercy took again in her hand the yellow ivory whistle, and ran her fingers over the faded and frayed pink ribbon, and looked at it with an indefinable sense of its being a strange link between her and a distant past, which, though she had never shared it, belonged to her by right.  Hardly thinking what she did, she raised the whistle to her lips, and blew a loud, shrill whistle on it.  Her mother started.  “O Mercy, don’t, don’t!” she cried.  “I can’t bear to hear it.”

“Now, mother, don’t you be foolish,” said Mercy, cheerily.  “A whistle’s a whistle, old or young, and made to be whistled with.  We’ll keep this to amuse children with:  you carry it in your pocket.  Perhaps we shall meet some children on the journey; and it’ll be so nice for you to pop this out of your pocket, and give it to them to blow.”

“So it will, Mercy, I declare.  That ’ud be real nice.  You’re a master-piece for thinkin’ o’ things.”  And, easily diverted as a child, the old woman dropped the whistle into her deep pocket, and, forgetting all her tears, returned to her packing.

Not so Mercy.  Having attained her end of cheering her mother, her own thoughts reverted again and again all day long, and many times in after years, whenever she saw the ivory whistle, to the strange picture of the lonely old woman in the garret coming upon her first-born child’s first toy, lost for forty years; the picture, too, of the history of the quaint piece of carving itself; the day it was slowly cut and chiselled by a patient and ill-paid toiler in some city of China; its voyage in the keeping of the ardent young husband hastening home to welcome his first child; its forty years of silence and darkness in the old garret; and then its return to life and light and sound, in the hands and lips of new generations of children.