Draw your chair up nearer to the fireside.

It is the hour of twilight. Soon, so very soon, another of Life's little days will have silently crept behind us into the long dim limbo of half-forgotten years.

We are alone—you and I. Yet between us—unseen, but very real—are Memories linking us to one another and to the generation who, like ourselves, is growing old. How still the world outside seems to have grown! The shadows are lengthening, minute by minute, and presently, the garden, so brightly beautiful such a little time ago in all the colour of its September beauty, will be lost to us in the magic mystery of Night. Who knows? if in the darkest shadows Angels are not standing, and God, returning in this twilight hour, will stay with us until the coming of the Dawn!

Inside the room the fire burns brightly, for the September evenings are very chilly. Its dancing flames illumine us as if pixies were shaking their tiny lanterns in our faces.

DON'T you love the Twilight Hour, when heart seems to speak to heart, and Time seems as if it had ceased for a moment to pursue its Deathless course, lingering in the shadows for a while!

It is the hour when old friends meet to talk of "cabbages and kings," and Life and Love and all those unimportant things which happened long ago in the Dead Yesterdays. Or perhaps, we both sit silent for a space. We do not speak, yet each seems to divine the other's thought. That is the wonder of real Friendship, even the silence speaks, telling to those who understand the thoughts we have never dared to utter.

So we sit quietly, dreaming over the dying embers. We make no effort, we do not strive to "entertain." We simply speak of Men and Matters and how they influenced us and were woven unconsciously into the pattern of our inner lives.

So the long hour of twilight passes—passes. . . . . .

And each hour is no less precious because there will be so many hours "over the fireside" for both of us, now that we are growing old.

But we would not become young again, merely to grow old again.

No! NO!

Age, after all, has MEMORIES, and each Memory is as a story that is told.

Do you know those lovely lines by John Masefield—

"I take the bank and gather to the fire,
Turning old yellow leaves; minute by minute
The clock ticks to my heart. A withered wire,
Moves a thin ghost of music in the spinet.
I cannot sail your seas, I cannot wander
Your cornfield, nor your hill-land, nor your valleys
Ever again, nor share the battle yonder
Where the young knight the broken squadron rallies.
Only stay quiet while my mind remembers
The beauty of fire from the beauty of embers."

And so I hope that a few of the embers in this little book will help to warm some unknown human heart.

And that is all I ask!