t the
women folks--and there ain't one of us that hasn't rocked houses and
stole watermelons and robbed orchards and disturbed meetin' and done
all the rest o' the devilment that boys delight in. But jest let a boy
play a joke on us and we forgit all about the sins of our youth. To
hear us talk, a person would think that we was born sixty years old.'
Says he: 'All we've lost is an hour's sleep, and we can make that up
by goin' to bed earlier to-morrow night. Now, why not overlook this
little caper of Martin Luther's and begin the new year in a good humor
with everything and everybody?'

"And Sam Amos he begun to laugh, and he laughed till he had to set
down, and he kept on till Milly got skeered and beat him in the back
to make him stop, and finally he got his breath and says he, 'I'm
laughin' to think how we all looked settin' here at one o'clock in the
mornin' waitin' to hear the clock strike twelve.' And then he started
out again, and we laughed with him, and everybody went home in a good
humor. I ricollect me and Abram had an argument on the way home about
whether it was worth while to go to bed or not. Abram said it was
worth while to go to bed if you couldn't sleep but a half-hour, but
betwixt laughin' and ridin' in the cold air I was so wide awake I felt
like I never wanted to sleep again; and I went to work and cleaned up
the house and cut out some sewin' and had breakfast ready by half-past
four. I never made that sleep up, child, and I never felt any worse
for it. You know what the Bible says, 'As thy days so shall thy
strength be,' and when a person's young, there's strength for the day
and more besides."

Aunt Jane dropped her knitting and rested her head against the
patchwork cover of the high-backed chair. Like a great wall of shelter
and defense, we felt around us the deep stillness of a midwinter night
in the country. The last traveler had gone his homeward way over the
pike hours ago, and in the quiet room we could hear now and then those
faint noises made by shrinking timbers, as if the old house groaned in
the icy clutch of the December cold, and, louder and clearer than by
day, the voice of the clock ticking away the last hours of the old
year.

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 day