was going on,
but his chief treasures were deposited in a basket at the front gate,
with the idea that they would be transported as his personal baggage.
The pile grew and grew: a woolly lamb, two Noah's arks, bottles and
marbles innumerable, a bag of pebbles, a broken steam engine, two china
nest-eggs, an orange, a banana and some walnuts, a fishing line, a
trowel, a ball of string. These give an idea of the quality of Peter's
effects, but not of the quantity.

Ellen the cook labored loyally, for it was her last week's work with the
family. She would be left behind, like Charlestown and all the old life,
when Mother Carey and the stormy petrels flitted across unknown waters
from one haven to another. Joanna having earlier proved utterly
unromantic in her attitude, Nancy went further with Ellen and gave her
an English novel called, "The Merriweathers," in which an old family
servant had not only followed her employers from castle to hovel,
remaining there without Wages for years, but had insisted on lending all
her savings to the Mistress of the Manor. Ellen the cook had loved "The
Merriweathers," saying it was about the best book that ever she had
read, and Miss Nancy would like to know, always being so interested,
that she (Ellen) had found a place near Joanna in Salem, where she was
offered five dollars a month more than she had received with the Careys.
Nancy congratulated her warmly and then, tearing "The Merriweathers" to
shreds, she put them in the kitchen stove in Ellen's temporary absence.
"If ever I write a book," she ejaculated, as she "stoked" the fire with
Gwendolen and Reginald Merriweather, with the Mistress of the Manor, and
especially with the romantic family servitor, "if ever I write a book,"
she repeated, with emphatic gestures, "it won't have any fibs in
it;--and I suppose it will be dull," she reflected, as she remembered
how she had wept when the Merriweathers' Bridget brought her savings of
a hundred pounds to her mistress in a handkerchief.

During these preparations for the flitting Nancy had a fresh idea every
minute or two, and gained immense prestige in the family.

Inspired by her eldest daughter Mrs. Carey sold her grand piano, getting
an old-fashioned square one and a hundred and fifty dollars in exchange.
It had been a wedding present from a good old uncle, who, if he had been
still alive, would have been glad to serve his niece now that she was in
difficulties.

Nancy, her sleeves