FullReads

“George,” said Fanny, “I know we can get along if you say so. I know it will be very hard upon you. There are so many things the other young men do which you will not be able to do; and so many things which they have which you might have. But none of them has a sister who loves them as I love you. And, as he said, ‘Love is the whole.'”

I suppose those words over the hearth were almost the only words of sentiment which ever passed between those two about their plans. But from that moment those plans went forward more perfectly than if they had been talked over at every turn, and amended every day. That is the way with all true stories of hearth and home.

For instance, it was only that evening, when the day’s work of all the six was done–and for boys and girls, it was hard work, too–Fanny and George would have been glad enough, both of them, to take each a book, and have the comfort of resting and reading. But George saw that the younger girls looked down-cast and heavy, and that the boys were whispering round the door-steps as if they wanted to go down to the blacksmith’s shop by way of getting away from the sadness of the house. He hated to have them begin the habit of loafing there, with all the lazy boys and men from three miles round. And so he laid down his book, and said, as cheerily as if he had not laid his father’s body in the grave the day before,–

“What shall we do to-night that we can all do together? Let us have something that we have never had before. Let us try what Mrs. Chisholm told us about. Let us act a ballad.”

Of course the children were delighted with acting. George knew that, and Fanny looked across so gratefully to him, and laid her book away also; and, in a minute, Ethan, the young carpenter of the family, was putting up sconces for tallow candles to light the scenes, and Fanny had Sarah and Alice out in the wood-house, with the shawls, and the old ribbons, and strips of bright calico, which made up the dresses, and George instructed Walter as to the way in which he should arrange his armor and his horse, and so, after a period of preparation, which was much longer than the period of performance, they got ready to act in the kitchen the ballad of Lochinvar.

The children had a happy evening. They were frightened when they went to bed–the little ones–because they had been so merry. They came together with George and Fanny, and read their Bible as they had been used to do with their father, and the last text they read was, “Love is the fulfilling of the law.” So the little ones went to bed, and left George and Fanny again together.

“Pretty hard, was it not?” said she, smiling through her tears. “But it is so much best for them that home should be the happiest place of all for them. After all, ‘Love is the whole.'”

And that night’s sacrifice, which the two older children made to the younger brothers and sisters as it were over their father’s grave, was the beginning of many such nights, and of many other joint amusements which the children arranged together. They read Dickens aloud. They cleared out the corn-room at the end of the wood-house for a place for their dialogues and charades. The neighbors’ children liked to come in, and, under very strict rules of early hours and of good behavior, they came. And George and Fanny found, not only that they were getting a reputation for keeping their own little flock in order, but that the nicest children all around were intrusted to their oversight, even by the most careful fathers and mothers. All this pleasure to the children came from the remembrance that “Love is the whole.”