rn 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 not; but the thought of them brings no sadness with it.
Wherever they are, we can well believe they are doing God's work and
getting His wages.

But are there not some, whom we still see sometimes in the streets,
whose haunts and homes we know, whom we could probably find almost any
day in the week if we were set to do it, yet from whom we are really
farther than we are from the dead, and from those who have gone out of
our ken? Yes, there are and must be such; and therein lies the sadness
of old School memories. Yet of these our old comrades, from whom more
than time and space separate us, there are some, by whose sides we can
feel sure that we shall stand again when time shall be no more. We may
think of one another now as dangerous fanatics or narrow bigots, with
whom no truce is possible, from whom we shall only sever more and more
to the end of our lives, whom it would be our respective duties to
imprison or hang, if we had the power. We must go our way, and they
theirs, as long as flesh and spirit hold togeth