s best friends to die
off-hand.

But East's powers of remaining serious were exhausted, and in five
minutes he was saying the most ridiculous things he could think of, till
Tom was almost getting angry again.

Despite of himself, however, he couldn't help laughing and giving it up,
when East appealed to him with, "Well, Tom, you ain't going to punch my
head, I hope, because I insist upon being sorry when you got to earth?"

And so their talk finished for that time, and they tried to learn first
lesson, with very poor success, as appeared next morning, when they were
called up and narrowly escaped being floored, which ill-luck, however,
did not sit heavily on either of their souls.

CHAPTER VIII--TOM BROWN'S LAST MATCH.

"Heaven grant the manlier heart, that timely ere
Youth fly, with life's real tempest would be coping;
The fruit of dreamy hoping
Is, waking, blank despair."--CLOUGH, Ambarvalia.

The curtain now rises upon the last act of our little drama, for
hard-hearted publishers warn me that a single volume must of necessity
have an end. Well, well! the pleasantest things must come to an end.
I little thought last long vacation, when I began these pages to help
while away some spare time at a watering-place, how vividly many an old
scene which had lain hid away for years in some dusty old corner of my
brain, would come back again, and stand before me as clear and bright as
if it had happened yesterday. The book has been a most grateful task
to me, and I only hope that all you, my dear young friends, who read it
(friends assuredly you must be, if you get as far as this), will be half
as sorry to come to the last stage as I am.

Not but what there has been a solemn and a sad side to it. As the old
scenes became living, and the actors in them became living too, many
a grave in the Crimea and distant India, as well as in the quiet
churchyards of our dear old country, seemed to open and send forth their
dead, and their voices and looks and ways were again in one's ears and
eyes, as in the old School-days. But this was not sad. How should it be,
if we believe as our Lord has taught us? How should it be, when one more
turn of the wheel, and we shall be by their sides again, learning from
them again, perhaps, as we did when we were new boys.

Then there were others of the old faces so dear to us once who had
somehow or another just gone clean out of sight. Are they dead or
living? We know n