[Illustration]


GRANDMA'S MEMORIES.


The mantle of evening is veiling the sky,
And over the landscape its soft shadows lie;
The old year is passing, a new year will reign,
Ere earth shall awaken to day-dawn again.

Dear Grandma has folded her knitting away,
And muses alone at the close of the day;
While the old clock ticks solemnly off, one by one,
The moments yet left to the year almost done.

Out from the shadows fast filling the room,
Out from the dying year's gathering gloom,
Many sweet pictures of past happy years
Come flitting again with their hopes and their fears.

On the broad hearthstone the dull embers glow,
The old year's last hours are quiet and slow;
But back to the Past, with its pleasures and pain--
Of the Present unmindful, she wanders again.

She is seeing dear faces, and clasping the hand
Of many a friend in the shadowy land,
And the ghosts of old years she has watched in and out,