anksgiving came,
Mr. George Stacy sent him home for a fortnight, with a special message
to his sister, "that he could not do without him, and he wished she
would send him a dozen of such boys. He knew how to raise oxen, he said;
but would Miss Fanny tell him how she brought up boys like Walter?"

"I could have told him," said Walter, "but I did not choose to; I could
have told him that love was the whole."

And that story of Walter is only the story of the way in which Ethan
also kept up the home tie, and came back, when he got a chance, from his
voyages. His voyages were not on the sea. He "hired out" with a
canal-boatman. Sometimes they went to the lake, and once they set sail
there and came as far as Cleveland. Ethan made a great deal of fun in
pretending to tell great sea-stories, like Swiss Family Robinson and
Sinbad the Sailor. Fresh-water voyaging has its funny side, as has the
deep-sea sailing. But Ethan did not hold to it long. His experience with
grain brought him at last to Chicago, and he engaged there in the work
of an elevator. But he lived always the old home life. There were three
other boys he got acquainted with, one at Mr. Eggleston's church, one at
the Custom House, and one at the place where he got his dinner, and they
used to come up to his little room in the seventh story of the McKenzie
House, and sit on his bed and in his chairs, just as the boys from the
blacksmith's came into the corn-room. These four boys made a literary
club "for reading Shakespeare and the British essayists." Often did they
laugh afterwards at its title. They called it the Club of the Tetrarchy,
because they thought it grand to have a Greek name. Whatever its name
was, it kept them out of mischief. These boys grew up to be four ruling
powers in Western life. And when, years after, some one asked Ethan how
it was that he had so stanch a friend in Torrey, Ethan told the history
of the seventh-story room at the McKenzie House, and he said, "Love is
the whole."

Central in all his life was the little cabin of two rooms and a loft
over it. There is no day of his life, from that time to this, of which
Fanny cannot tell you the story from his weekly letters home. For though
she does not live in the cabin now, she keeps the old letters filed and
in order, and once a week steadily Ethan has written to her, and the
letters are all sealed now with his own seal-ring, and on the seal-ring
is carved the inscription, "Love is the whole.