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 carriest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep: in the morning they are like grass which groweth up. "In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth.... "For all our days are passed away in thy wrath; we spend our years as a tale that is told. "The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.... "So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.... "O satisfy us early with thy mercy; that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. "Make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us, and the years wherein we have seen evil. "Let thy work appear unto thy servants, and thy glory unto their children. "And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us; and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it."