What is there in the flight of years to sadden the heart? Our little times and seasons are but fragments of eternity, and eternity is ours. The sunset on which we gaze with melancholy eyes is a sunrise on the other side of the world, and the vanishing days can take from us nothing that may not be restored by some day yet unborn. Eternity! Immortality! If mortal mind could but fathom the depth of these ideas, they would be as wells of peace in which all trouble, all regret, would be forever drowned. But as Aunt Jane and I sat alone by her deserted hearth we saw the shadows of the night deepening while the fire burned low, and in our hearts we felt another and a darker shadow cast by the wing of the passing year. And, breaking our dreams, the clock struck ten. Aunt Jane gave a start, and the ball of yarn fell from her lap. She picked it up before I could reach it, and winding the yarn and rolling the stocking around the ball she called in her wandering thoughts and entered instantly into the life of the present hour.
"Light the lamp, child," she said, "and hand me my Bible. The Scripture's got a word suitable for every season, and I'll read you the psalm that Parson Page read the night the clock didn't strike."
"REVERENTLY SHE LAID THE HEAVY CALF-BOUND VOLUME ACROSS HER KNEES."
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Reverently she laid the heavy calf-bound volume across her knees, and turning the leaves with swift and certain fingers she found the ninetieth psalm as readily as the twentieth-century woman finds Sordello in her complete Browning. Centuries ago, a Hebrew, standing on one of the mountain peaks of old age, saw in a vision the little lives and the little deeds of men outlined against a background of the "eternal years of God." He put the vision into words, and because they held a universal thought, a burden of the soul in every age and clime, those words have outlasted kingdoms and dynasties. I had often heard the rhythmic lines rolling from priestly lips and echoing under cathedral arches, but never had they moved me as now, when by the dying fire in the last hours of a dying year, I heard them, half chanted, half read, in the tremulous voice of an old woman whose feet were on the same height and whose eyes beheld the same vision:
"Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.
"Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.
"Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men.
"For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.