Letter after letter they have flared, and blackened, and shrivelled up. There is an end of them—they are gone. Not a line of those different handwritings shall I ever see again. The bold, familiar scrawl of the tried friend and more than brother; why does he come back to me so vividly to-night? The stout heart, the strong arm, the brave, kind face, the frank and manly voice. We shall never tread the stubble nor the heather side by side again; never more pull her up against the stream, nor float idly down in the hot summer noons to catch the light air off the water on our heated faces; to discourse, like David and Jonathan, of all and everything nearest our hearts. Old friend! old friend! wherever you are, if you have consciousness you must surely sometimes think of _me_; I have not forgotten _you_. I cannot believe you have forgotten me even _there_. And the pains-taking, up-and-down-hill characters of the little child—the little child for whom the angels came so soon, yet found it ready to depart, whose fever-wasted lips formed none but words of confidence and affection, whose blue eyes turned their last dim, dying looks so fondly on the face it loved. And there were letters harder to part with than these. Never mind, they are burnt and done with; letters of which even the superscription once made a kind heart leap with pleasure so intense it was almost pain; letters crossed and re-crossed in delicate, orderly lines, bearing the well-known cipher, breathing the well-known perfume, telling the old, false tale in the old, false phrases, so trite and worn-out, yet seeming always so fresh and new. The hand that formed them has other tasks to occupy it now; the heart from which they came is mute and cold. Hope withers, love dies—times are altered. What would you have? It is a world of change. Nevertheless this has been a disheartening job; it has put me in low spirits; I must call “Bones” out of his cupboard to come and sit with me. “What is this charm,” I ask him, “that seems to belong so exclusively to the past?—this ‘tender grace of a day that is dead’? and must I look after it down the gulf into which it has dropped with such irrepressible longing only because it will never come back to me? Is a man the greater or wiser that he lived a hundred years ago or a thousand? Are reputations, like wine, the mellower and the more precious for mere age, even though they have been hid away in a cellar all the time? Is a thing actually fairer and better because I have almost forgotten how it looked when present, and shall never set eyes on it again? I entertain the greatest aversion to Horace’s _laudator temporis acti_, shall always set my face against the superstition that ‘there were giants in those days’; and yet wherever I went in the world previous to my retirement here that I might live with you, I found the strange maxim predominate, that everything was very much better before it had been improved!