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."

Far from finding themselves a lonely and forsaken family, these boys and
girls soon found that they were surrounded with friends. George was
quite ri