Though Brooks could frolic upon occasion, his mood in his student days was prevailingly grave, and as he matured, warmed, and deepened into earnest religious conviction. My own close association with him came to an end at our graduation. Our respective fates led us in fields widely apart, and we met only at rare intervals. Ten years after graduation we came together in a way for me memorable. He was already held in the affectionate reverence of multitudes, and perhaps established in the position in which he so long stood as the most moving and venerated of American preachers. At the commemoration for the Harvard soldiers, in 1865, he was the chaplain, and his prayer shares with the _Commemoration Ode_ of Lowell the admiration of men as an utterance especially uplifting. My humble function on that day was to speak for the rank and file, and Brooks and I, as classmates, sat elbow to elbow at the table under the great tent. He was charmingly genial and brotherly. His old playfulness came out as he rallied me on the deterioration he noticed in my table manners, due no doubt to my life in camp, and rebuked me with mock sternness for appropriating his portion of our common chicken. With evident pleasure, he drew out of his pocket the _Nation_, then just beginning, and showed me a kind notice of my _Thinking Bayonet_, written by Charles Eliot Norton. But behind the smile and the joke lay a new dignity and earnestness, a quality he had taken on since the days of our old comradeship. So it always was as we met transiently while the decades passed until the threshold of old age lay across the path for both of us. Now and then I had from him an affectionate letter. One of these I found profoundly touching. Theodore Lyman lay prostrate with a lingering and painful illness from which he never rose. Brooks wrote that he had carried to him my _Life of Young Sir Henry Vane_, and read from it to our dying friend. My story had interest for them, and I felt that whatever might befall my book I had not worked in vain if two such men found it worthy.