“No, no, no!  What yer got? what yer got?  Gie me somethin’, gie me somethin’.  Settle, settle, settle!  Gie me any thin’ yer got.  Settle, settle, settle!” The consequences of twenty years’ such traffic as this can more easily be imagined than described.  The room was piled from floor to roof with its miscellaneous collections:  junk-shops, pawnbrokers’ cellars, and old women’s garrets seemed all to have disgorged themselves here.  A huge stack of calico comforters, their tufts gray with dust and cobwebs, lay on top of two old ploughs, in one corner:  kegs of nails, boxes of soap, rolls of leather, harnesses stiff and cracking with age, piles of books, chairs, bedsteads, andirons, tubs, stone ware, crockery ware, carpets, files of old newspapers, casks, feather-beds, jars of druggists’ medicines, old signboards, rakes, spades, school-desks,—­in short, all things that mortal man ever bought or sold,—­were here, packed in piles and layers, and covered with dust as with a gray coverlid.  At each foot-fall on the loose boards of the floor, clouds of stifling dust arose, and strange sounds were heard in and behind the piles of rubbish, as if all sorts of small animals might be skurrying about, and giving alarms to each other.

Mercy stood still on the threshold, her face full of astonishment.  The dust made her cough; and at first she could hardly see which way to step.  The old man threw down his cane, and ran swiftly from corner to corner, and pile to pile, peering around, pulling out first one thing and then another.  He darted from spot to spot, bending lower and lower, as he grew more impatient in his search, till he looked like a sort of human weasel gliding about in quest of prey.

“Trash, trash, nothin’ but trash!” he muttered to himself as he ran.  “Burn it up some day.  Trash, trash!”

“How did you get all these queer things together, Mr. Wheeler?” Mercy ventured to say at last “Did you keep a store?”

The old man did not reply.  He was tugging away at a high stack of rolls of undressed leather, which reached to the ceiling in one corner.  He pulled them too hastily, and the whole stack tumbled forward, and rolled heavily in all directions, raising a suffocating dust, through which the old man’s figure seemed to loom up as through a fog, as he skipped to the right and left to escape the rolling bales.

“O Mr. Wheeler!” cried Mercy, “are you hurt?”

He laughed a choked laugh, more like a chuckle than like a laugh.

“He! he! child.  Dust don’t hurt me.  Goin’ to return to ’t presently.  Made on ’t! made on ’t!  Don’t see why folks need be so ’fraid on ’t!  He! he!  ’T is pretty choky, though.”  And he sat down on one of the leather rolls, and held his sides through a hard coughing fit.  As the dust slowly subsided, Mercy saw standing far back in the corner, where the bales of leather had hidden it, an old-fashioned clock, so like her own that she gave a low cry of surprise.