* * * * *
When I was a girl, Sunday evening used to be the part of the week that I
loved best; and I liked it better in Winter than in Summer. We used to
sit round a blazing fire; my mother used then to teach my little brother
Tom to say his prayers, and my father used to teach me to read in
Pilgrim's Progress, or some such book; while my brother John sat near
reading some book or other that was fit for a Sunday, with his dog
Hector lying at his feet.
My dear old grand-father was then alive, and he would sit at the table
with the large old family Bible before him for the whole evening.
As I look back upon the pleasant picture in my mind, my eye fills with
tears. I cannot help thinking of what has become of the faces that were
then so full of smiles and gladness. My grand-father went to the grave
first, but he died in a good old age; and though we mourned to lose him
whom we had all loved so much, we could not help feeling that it was a
happy change for him, as he could hardly see or hear. Next to him, my
poor little brother Tom fell ill of the typhus fever, and God took him
to heaven in the budding of his child-hood. Only a year or two ago, my
father gave me his dying blessing, and was then a very old man. My
mother now survives, though very old; and my two sisters, Mary and
Elizabeth, who were then lively girls, are living, and are the mothers
of families. My brother John, a middle-aged man, is the Captain of a
ship, being now far away on a voyage; and he has left behind him a wife
and two boys, the youngest of whom is as old as he was at the time I
have spoken of. I am almost an old woman; though on these happy evenings
that I was speaking of, I was the youngest but one.
You, my little friends, will, perhaps, some day have to look back upon
such changes as I have seen. The thought that they will come upon you
need not make you sad, but it should make you good, and cause you to
resolve to do your duty and to serve God. If you do so, when you get as
old as I am, you will find that if age brings its cares and sorrows, it
also brings surer and even brighter hopes of a life beyond the grave.
[Illustration: SUNDAY EVENING]