“But, for all his queerness, I like him, and I believe he’ll be a great friend of ours,” she said, as she finished her story.

Mrs. Carr was knitting a woollen stocking.  She had been knitting woollen stockings ever since Mercy could remember.  She always kept several on hand in different stages of incompletion:  some that she could knit on in the dark, without any counting of stitches; others that were in the process of heeling or toeing, and required the closest attention.  She had been setting a heel while Mercy was speaking, and did not reply for a moment.  Then, pushing the stitches all into a compact bunch in the middle of one needle, she let her work fall into her lap, and, rolling the disengaged knitting-needle back and forth on her knee to brighten it, looked at Mercy reflectively.

“Mercy,” said she, “queer people allers do take to each other.  I don’t believe he’s a bit queerer ’n you are, child.”  And Mrs. Carr laughed a little laugh, half pride and half dissatisfaction.  “You’re jest like your father:  he’d make friends with a stranger, any day, on the street, in two jiffeys, if he took a likin’ to him; and there might be neighbors a livin’ right long ‘side on us, for years an’ years, thet he’d never any more ’n jest pass the time o’ day with, ‘n’ he wa’n’t a bit stuck up, either.  I used ter ask him, often ‘n’ often, what made him so offish to sum folks, when I knew he hadn’t the least thing agin ’em; and he allers said, sez he, ‘Well, I can’t tell ye nothin’ about it, only jest this is the way ’t is:  I can’t talk to ’em; they sort o’ shet me up, like.  I don’t feel nateral, somehow, when they’re round!’”

“O mother!” exclaimed Mercy, “I think I must be just like father.  That is exactly the way I feel so often.  When I get with some people, I feel just as if I had been changed into somebody else.  I can’t bear to open my mouth.  It is like a bad dream, when you dream you can’t move hand nor foot, all the time they’re in the room with me.”

“Well, I thank the Lord, I don’t never take such notions about people,” said Mrs. Carr, settling herself back in her chair, and beginning to make her needles fly.  “Nobody don’t never trouble me much, one way or the other.  For my part, I think folks is alike as peas.  We shouldn’t hardly know ’em apart, if ’t wa’n’t for their faces.”

Mercy was about to reply, “Why, mother, you just said that I was queer; and this old man was queer; and my father must have been queer, too.”  But she glanced at the placid old face, and forbore.  There was a truth as well as an untruth in the inconsistent sayings, and both lay too deep for the childish intellect to grasp.

Mercy was impatient to go at once to see their new home; but she could not induce her mother to leave the house.

“O Mercy!” she exclaimed pathetically, “ef yer knew what a comfort ’t was to me jest to set still in a chair once more.  It seems like heaven, arter them pesky joltin’ cars.  I ain’t in no hurry to see the house.  It can’t run away, I reckon; and we’re sure of it, ain’t we?  There ain’t any thing that’s got to be done, is there?” she asked nervously.