Returning to the drawing-room after hearing my girls’ prayers, and assuaging their impatience at the lagging flight of time, by telling them that, in twenty-two hours more, they would be hanging up their stockings, I found my father alone. He stood on the rug, looking down into the scarlet depths of the coals, his hands behind him and his head bent—in thought, not in sadness, for he turned a bright face to me as my voice awoke him from his revery: “‘A penny for your thoughts!’” I said it gayly, laying my hand on his shoulder. He turned his cheek to meet it. “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; There is a joy for souls distressed, A balm for every wounded breast,— ’Tis found alone in Heaven!” We sang, last of all, _The Shining Shore_, and talked of the time when the composer set the MS. upon the piano-rack, with the ink hardly dried upon the score, and trial was made of the music in that very room—could it be just eleven years ago? My father left us as the clock struck ten. My mother lingered half an hour later. We all knew, although none of us spoke of it, that he liked to have a little time for devotional reading on Sunday evening, before he went to bed. He had not demitted the habit in fifty-odd years, yet I doubt if he had ever mentioned, even to his wife, why he kept it up and what it meant to him.