read together on Christmas Eve this beautiful meditation on the season, and now it has gathered about itself such a host of memories that it has become part of our common past. It is, indeed, a veritable palimpsest, overlaid with tender and gracious recollections out of which the original thought gains a new and subtle sweetness. As I read it aloud I know that she sees once more the familiar landscape about Dreamthorp, with the low, dark hill in the background, and over it "the tender radiance that precedes the moon"; the village windows are all lighted, and the "whole place shines like a congregation of glowworms." There are the skaters still leaning against the frosty wind"; there is the "gray church tower amid the leafless elms," around which the echoes of the morning peal of Christmas bells still hover; the village folk have gathered, "in their best dresses and their best faces"; the beautiful service of the church has been read and answered with heartfelt responses, the familiar story has been told again simply and urgently, with applications for every thankful soul, and then the congregation has gone to its homes and its festivities.

All these things, I am sure, lie within Rosalind's vision, although she seems to see nothing but the ruddy blaze of the fire; all these things I see, as I have seen them these many Christmas Eves agone; but with this familiar landscape there are mingled all the sweet and sorrowful memories of our common life, recalled at this hour that the light of the

highest truth may interpret them anew in the divine language of hope. I read on until I come to the quotation from the "Hymn to the Nativity," and then I close the book, and take up a copy of Milton close at hand. We have had our commemoration service of love, and now there comes into our thought, with the organ roll of this sublime hymn, the universal truth which lies at the heart of the season. I am hardly conscious that it is my voice which makes these words audible: I am conscious only of this mighty-voiced anthem, fit for the choral song of the morning stars:

Ring out, ye crystal spheres,
And bless our human ears,

If ye have power to touch our senses so;
And let your silver chime

Move in melodious time;

And let the bass of heaven's deep organ blow;
And, with your ninefold harmony,

Make up full concert to the angelic symphony.

"For, if such holy song

Enwrap our fancy long,

Time will run back and fetch the age of gold;
And speckled vanity

Will sicken soon and die,

And leprous sin will melt from earthly mold;

And hell itself will pass away,

And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day.

"The oracles are dumb,

No voice or hideous hum

Runs through the archéd roof in words deceiving ;

Apollo from his shrine

Can no more divine

With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving,

No nightly trance or breathéd spell

Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.

"The lonely mountains o'er,

And the resounding shore,

A voice of weeping heard and loud lament;
From haunted spring, and dale

Edged with poplars pale,

The parting genius is with sighing sent;

With flower-enwoven tresses torn,

The nymphs in twilight shades of tangled thickets mourn."

room.

Like a psalm the great Hymn fills the air, and like a psalm it remains in the memory. The fire has burned low, and a soft and solemn light fills the Neither of us speaks while the clock strikes twelve. I look out of the window. The heavens are ablaze with light, and somewhere amid those circling constellations I know that a new star has found its place, and is shining with such a ray as never before fell from heaven to earth.

CHAPTER VII.

NEW YEAR S EVE.

THE last fire of many that have blazed on my hearth these twelve months gone is fast sinking into ashes. I do not care to revive its expiring flame, because I find its slow fading into darkness harmonious with the hour and the thought which. comes with it as the shadow follows the cloud. While it is true that our division of time into years is purely conventional, and finds no recognition or record on the great dial face of the heavens, no man can be quite oblivious of it. New Year's eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights. The vast and shadowy stream of time sweeps on without break, but the traveler who has been journeying with it cannot be entirely unmindful that he is perceptibly nearer the end of his wanderings. It is an old story, this irresistible and ceaseless onflow of life and time; time always scattering the flowers of life with a lavish hand along its course; but each

man recalls it for himself and to each it wears some new aspect. The vision of Mirza never wholly fades from the sight of men.

From such thoughts as these, which would be commonplace enough if it were not for the pathos in them, I am recalled by a singular play of the expiring flames on the titles of my books. Many of these are so indistinct that I cannot read them; indeed, the farther corners of the room are lost entirely in the gloom that is fast gaining on the dying light. But there are two rows of books whose titles I discover readily as I sit before the fire, and I note that they are the great, vital works which belong to all races and times; the books which form the richest inheritance of each new generation, and which the whole world has come to hold as its best possession. In the deepening shadows, and at this. solitary hour, there is something deeply significant, something solemn and consoling, in the great names which I read there. A multitude of other names, full of light and beauty in their time, have been remorselessly swept into oblivion by the fading of the light; at this moment they are as utterly vanished as if they had never been. But these other names— and I note among them Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Cervantes-stand out clear and familiar amid even the shadows.

I recall the old maxim of the English common law, that no time runs against the king, and I see at a glance the deep and wide meaning which escapes