“My thoughts were running upon what has kept them busy all day. I suppose I ought to be ashamed to confess it, but I lost one ‘head’ of Doctor Hoge’s sermon this afternoon. I was thinking of—my children!”
His voice sank into a tender cadence it seldom took. He was reckoned an undemonstrative man, and he had a full strain of the New England Puritan in his blood.
I waited to steady my own voice before asking, softly, “And what of them, father?”
The query was never answered. The opening door let in a stream of happy humanity—mother, brothers, and sisters—Mea and her husband, Horace and Percy, Myrtle and her fiancé, “Will” Robertson, who would, ere long, be one of us in fact, as he was now in heart. They were full of Christmas plans and talk. Among other items one was fixed in my memory by subsequent events. In consequence of the intervention of Sunday, the business of decorating the house had to be postponed until Monday. The evergreens were to be sent in from the country early on the morrow. Percy reported that the snow had begun to fall. If the roads were heavy by morning, would the countryman who had promised a liberal store of running cedar, pine, and juniper, in addition to the Christmas-tree, keep his word?
“I will see that the evergreens are provided,” my father laid the disquiet by saying. “There will be no harm in engaging a double supply.”
Then Mea went to the piano, and we had the olden-time Sunday-evening concert, all the dear old hymns we could recall, among them two called for by our father:
“God moves in a mysterious way,”
and,
“There is an hour of peaceful rest,
To weary wanderers given;