For four years it has grown in our affections.  Hope has been ours.  We have lived and laughed and sung and progressed....  But we have also wept and grieved.

Twice the doctor had said we were to conquer.  Then came last spring and the end of hope.  Week after week, Marjorie saw the sunbeams filter through the windows of her open porch; near by, a pair of robins built their nest; she watched them and knew them and named them.  We planned great things together and great journeys we should make.  That they were not to be she never knew....  And then she fell asleep....

Her little life had fulfilled its mission.  She had brought joy and beauty and faith into our hearts; she had comforted us in our hours of loneliness and despair; she had been the little cheerful builder of our home—­and perhaps God needed her.

She continued to sleep for three days, only for those three days her sun porch was a bower of roses.  On Memorial Day, Mother and I stood once more together beside a little mound where God had led us.  Late that afternoon we returned to the home to which Marjorie had taken us.  It had grown more lovely with the beauty which has been ours, because of her.

* * * * *

The home is not yet completed.  We still cherish our dreams of what it is to be.  We would change this and that.  But, after all, what the home is to be is not within our power to say.  We hope to go forward together, building and changing and improving it.  To-morrow shall see something that was not there yesterday.  But through sun and shade, through trial and through days of ease and of peace, it is our hope that something of our best shall still remain.  Whatever happens, it is our hope that what may be “just a house” to many shall be to us the home we have been building for the last fifteen years.

HOME

By Edgar A. Guest

  It takes a heap o’ livin’ in a house t’ make it home,
  A heap o’ sun an’ shadder, an’ ye sometimes have t’ roam
  Afore ye really ‘preciate the things ye lef’ behind,
  An’ hunger fer ’em somehow, with ’em allus on yer mind. 
  It don’t make any differunce how rich ye get t’ be,
  How much yer chairs an’ tables cost, how great yer luxury;
  It ain’t home t’ ye, though it be the palace of a king,
  Until somehow yer soul is sort o’ wrapped round everything.

  Home ain’t a place that gold can buy or get up in a minute;
  Afore it’s home there’s got t’ be a heap o’ livin’ in it;
  Within the walls there’s got t’ be some babies born, and then
  Right there ye’ve got t’ bring ’em up t’ women good, an’ men;
  And gradjerly, as time goes on, ye find ye wouldn’t part
  With anything they ever used—­they’ve grown into yer heart: 
  The old high chairs, the playthings, too, the little shoes they wore