talked it over with Mary.

Thus, in one way or another, all the new books found their way into
the Ballards' home, were read and commented on, even though books were
not written so much for commercial purposes then as now, and their
writers were looked up to with more respect than criticism. The
_Atlantic Monthly_ and _Littell's Living Age_, _Harper's Magazine_,
and the _New York Tribune_ also brought up a variety of subjects for
discussion. Now and then a new poem by Whittier, or Bryant, or some
other of the small galaxy of poets who justly were becoming the
nation's pride, would appear and be read aloud to Mary as she prepared
their meals, or washed the dishes or ironed small garments, while
Betty listened with intent eyes and ears, as she helped her mother or
tended the baby.

That afternoon, while the storm soughed without, the cow and horse
were comfortably quartered in their small stable, which was banked
with straw to keep out the cold. Indoors, Jamie was whittling behind
the warm cookstove over a newspaper spread to catch the chips, while
Bobby played quietly in a corner with two gray kittens and a worsted
ball. Janey was asleep in the crib which Betty jogged now and then
while she knit on a sock for the soldiers,--Mary and the two little
girls were always knitting socks for the soldiers these days in their
spare moments and during the long winter evenings,--Mary was kneading
white loaves of bread with floury hands, and Bertrand sat close beside
the window to catch the last rays of daylight by which to read the war
news.

Bertrand always read the war news first,--news of battles and lists of
wounded and slain and imprisoned, and saddest of all, lists of the
missing,--following closely the movements of their own company of
"boys" from Leauvite. Mary listened always with a thought of the
shadow in the banker's home, and the mother there, watching and
waiting for the return of her boy. Although their own home was safe,
the sorrow of other homes, devastated and mourning, weighed heavily
upon Mary Ballard, and she needed to listen to the stirring editorials
of the _Tribune_, which Bertrand read with dramatic intensity, to
bolster up her faith in the rightness of this war between men who
ought to be brothers in their hopes and ambitions for the national
life of their great country.

"I suppose it is too great a thing to ask--that such a tremendous and
mixed nation as ours should be knit together for the good of a