And so it came to pass that this woman, so well known, so widely beloved, lay a night and a day dead, within a few hours' journey of her home as unknown as if she had been cast up from a shipwrecked vessel on a strange shore.
The two old crones sat with the body all night and all the next day.

They sewed on the quaint garments in which it is still the custom of rural New England to robe the dead.

They put a cap of stiff white muslin over Mercy's brown hair, which even now, in her fiftieth year, showed only here and there a silver thread.

They laid fine plaits of the same stiff white muslin over her breast, and crossed her hands above them.
"She must ha' been a handsome woman in her time, Mis' Bunker.

I 'spect she was married, don't you ?" said Ann Sweetser, Mrs.Bunker's spinster cousin, who always helped her on these occasions.
"Well, this ere ring looks like it," replied Mrs.Bunker, taking up a bit of the muslin and rubbing the broad gold band on the third finger of Mercy's left hand.