Aunt Jane began to laugh gently, and the knitting dropped from her hands. Another moment and she would have slipped away to the watch-meeting of forty years ago, leaving me alone in the quiet shadow-haunted room; but I called her back.
"How did Martin Luther happen to be at Goshen?" I asked. It was an idle question, but it served my purpose.
"Why, don't you ricollect?" said Aunt Jane brightly. "Brother Wilson preached in town, but after Squire Schuyler give him that house for a weddin' fee he lived there. That was betwixt and between the town and the country. Martin Luther loved the country jest like his father did, and there never was a watch-meetin' or a May-meetin' that Martin Luther wasn't on hand; but I'm bound to say that most o' the time it wasn't for any good.
"Well, by nine o'clock everything was ready for the watch-meetin' to begin, and Parson Page set the clock on the floor back o' the pulpit—it sounds a heap solemner at a watch-meetin', child, to hear the clock strike when you can't see it—and then he give out the first hymn:
"'A few more years shall roll,
A few more seasons come,
And we shall be with those that rest,
Asleep within the tomb.
"'A few more suns shall set
O'er these dark hills of time,
And we shall be where suns are not,
A far serener clime.'"
To me there seemed nothing joy-inspiring in the old hymn, but Aunt Jane smiled radiantly as she chanted the melancholy words that held in their cadences the voices of the choir and the music of the organ in the old country church.
"That's one o' the hymns we always sung at a watch-meetin'," she observed, "that and
"'Lo, on a narrow neck of land
'Twixt two unbounded seas I stand.'
"I love every one o' the old hymns, child, jest as much as I love my Bible, and I can take that hymn-book yonder and read over the hymns we used to sing at prayer-meetin' and communion and funerals and baptizin's, and I declare it's jest like livin' over again all the Sundays of my life. When we got through singin' the hymn Parson Page read a chapter out o' the Bible. It was the ninetieth psalm, the one that begins, 'Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations'; and then he give us a little talk, not a sermon exactly, but jest a little talk about the new year and the old year. I ricollect pretty much all he said as well as if it was yesterday. He said that there was nothin' sad about the passin' of the years, and every New-year's eve ought to be a time for rejoicin'; that life was jest a gainin' and a losin' and the two balanced pretty even. Every year we lost a little of our youth and a little of our strength, but we gained in wisdom and understandin'. He said if we'd improved our time and come up to our opportunities durin' the past year, we could go forward joyfully to meet the new year, and if we hadn't, why, still there wasn't any reason for givin' up and feelin' downhearted, for the mercy of the Lord was infinite, and there was always another chance waitin' for us, and if a man turned over a new leaf and made up his mind to do better, every day was a New-year's day.