air its tremulous
message that the soul of Daubeny had passed away.

CHAPTER TWENTY.

FAREWELL.

"Be the day weary or be the day long
At last it ringeth to even-song."

There was a very serious look on the faces of all the boys as they
thronged into chapel the next morning for the confirmation service. It
was a beautiful sight to see the subdued yet noble air, full at once of
humility and hope, wherewith many of the youthful candidates passed
along the aisle, and knelt before the altar, and with clasped hands and
bowed heads awaited the touch of the hands that blessed. As those young
soldiers of Christ knelt meekly in their places, resolving with pure and
earnest hearts to fight manfully in His service, and praying with
child-like faith for the aid of which they felt their need, it was
indeed a spectacle to recall the ideal of virtuous and Christian
boyhood, and to force upon the minds of many the contrast it presented
with the other too familiar spectacle of a boyhood coarse, defiant,
brutal, ignorant yet conceited, young in years but old in disobedience,
in insolence, in sin.

When the good bishop, in the course of his address, alluded to Daubeny's
death, there was throughout the chapel instantly that silence that can
be felt--that deep, unbroken hush of expectation and emotion which
always produces so indescribable an effect.

"There was one," he said, "who should have been confirmed to-day, who is
not here. He has passed away from us; he will never be present at an
earthly confirmation; he is `confirmed in heaven--confirmed by God.' I
hear, and I rejoice to hear, that for that confirmation he was indeed
prepared, and that he looked forward to it with some of his latest
thoughts. I hear that he was pre-eminent among you for the piety, the
purity, the amiability of his life and character, and his very death was
caused by the intense earnestness of his desire to use aright the
talents which God had entrusted to him. O! such a death of one so young
yet so fit to die is far happier than the longest and most prosperous of
sinful lives. Be sobered but not saddened by it. It is a proof of
God's merciful and tender love that this one of your schoolfellows was
taken in the clear and quiet dawn of a noble and holy life, and not some
other in the scarlet blossom of precocious and deadly sin. Be not
saddened therefore at the loss, but sobered by the warning. The fair,
sweet, purple flower of youth fall