.' I've lived pretty near
eighty years, and I've had my share o' trouble, but I'm far from
sayin' that the strength of my years is nothin' but labor and sorrow.
I never had a sorrow that I didn't know there was a happiness comin'
to make up for it. I've spent my life 'as a tale that is told,' and
I'm nearly to the end of it, but I'd be right glad, child, if I could
go back to the beginnin' and have it told all over again."

It is easy to pronounce a benediction on life when life is in its
morning; but with the darkness of the long night closing around us the
words that rise most often to human lips are the words of the cynic
king who, from "the dazzling height of a throne," surveyed the
magnificent ruin of his years and said,

"Vanity of vanities; all is vanity."

God once looked at a seething chaos which he called his world and
pronounced it good. Only a divinity could do this. And only the
divinity in man enables one to look back on the chaos of sorrow,
ecstasy, hope, despair, labor, failure, sin, and suffering which we
call life and say, "It is all good; I would live it again if I might."

Aunt Jane closed her Bible and laid it on the mahogany centre-table.
"Half-past ten o'clock," she said, glancing at the clock in the
corner. "I sometimes think, honey, that I'd like to watch the old year
out once more, for there's somethin' about the night that the day
hasn't got. But I'm too old to lose sleep unless there's a good reason
for it, so cover up the fire and we'll sleep the old year out instead
o' watchin' it out. This night's no more'n any other night, and it's
jest as Parson Page said, every day's a New-year's day."

_By the author of "The Land of Long Ago."_

AUNT JANE OF KENTUCKY

_By_ ELIZA CALVERT HALL

Illustrated by Beulah Strong. 12mo. Cloth. $1.50

Aunt Jane is perfectly delightful.--_The Outlook_, New York.

A book that plays on the heart strings.--_St. Louis
Post-Despatch._

What Mrs. Gaskill did in "Cranford" this author does for
Kentucky.--_Syracuse Herald._

A prose idyl. Nothing more charming has appeared in recent
fiction.--MARGARET E. SANGSTER.

These pages have in them much of the stuff that makes genuine
literature.--_Louisville Courier Journal._

Where so many have made caricatures of old-time country folk,
Eliza Calvert Hall has caught at once the real charm, the real
spirit, the real people, and the real joy of living which was
their