and, if their parents wished it, to leave at once. He should
send the whole School home if the fever spread.

The next day Arthur sickened, but there was no other case. Before the
end of the week thirty or forty boys had gone, but the rest stayed on.
There was a general wish to please the Doctor, and a feeling that it was
cowardly to run away.

On the Saturday Thompson died, in the bright afternoon, while the
cricket-match was going on as usual on the big-side ground: the Doctor
coming from his death-bed, passed along the gravel-walk at the side of
the close, but no one knew what had happened till the next day. At
morning lecture it began to be rumoured, and by afternoon chapel was
known generally; and a feeling of seriousness and awe at the actual
presence of death among them came over the whole School. In all the long
years of his ministry the Doctor perhaps never spoke words which sank
deeper than some of those in that day's sermon. "When I came yesterday
from visiting all but the very death-bed of him who has been taken from
us, and looked around upon all the familiar objects and scenes within
our own ground, where your common amusements were going on, with your
common cheerfulness and activity, I felt there was nothing painful in
witnessing that; it did not seem in any way shocking or out of tune
with those feelings which the sight of a dying Christian must be
supposed to awaken. The unsuitableness in point of natural feeling
between scenes of mourning and scenes of liveliness did not at all
present itself. But I did feel that if at that moment any of those
faults had been brought before me which sometimes occur amongst us; had
I heard that any of you had been guilty of falsehood, or of drunkenness,
or of any other such sin; had I heard from any quarter the language of
profaneness, or of unkindness, or of indecency; had I heard or seen any
signs of that wretched folly which courts the laugh of fools by
affecting not to dread evil and not to care for good, then the
unsuitableness of any of these things with the scene I had just quitted
would indeed have been most intensely painful. And why? Not because such
things would really have been worse than at any other time, but because
at such a moment the eyes are opened really to know good and evil,
because we then feel what it is so to live as that death becomes an
infinite blessing, and what it is so to live also, that it were good for
us if we had never been born."