s 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."

[Illustration: "REVERENTLY SHE LAID THE HEAVY CALF-BOUND VOLUME
ACROSS HER KNEES."
_Page 290._]

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.

"Thou c