MY DEAR A----: Your letter has moved me deeply. Yes, we are almost alone. Of all the dear group that used to gather in the old school-house, and play upon the common, and stroll along the river-banks in summer and skate upon its solid surface in winter, you and I are nearly all that remain. The Southern sea has poor H----; W----, the leader of our sports, fell (under another name, I think) with Custer's band in the wild tragedy of Montana; B---- and S---- won their honors, and were buried with them, on the battlefield; K---- lives a wreck in mind and body. The rest are scattered. The old homes are all changed; the inmates are gone from them for ever. And you are changed. No recollections of the past that your letter has called up have impressed me more sadly than the change you speak of in yourself. You have lost the faith of your childhood. It is true you do not speak of it as a loss: you think you have gained by it. Your early beliefs oppressed you, and you have escaped the burden by rejecting belief in God and in a future life. Let me claim the liberty of an old friend--it may be for the last time, for we shall soon both be away--and ask if you are _sure_ of your ground. The questions are too momentous, the interests involved are too great and too lasting, to be risked on an uncertainty. You are not, indeed, sure that there is no God, but you are sure that no man can prove that there is; and you are equally certain that there can be no future state of suffering for any. Your final conclusions you have reached through the influence of Mr. ----, and you admit that his hold on you and on others has come largely through his passionate denials of the doctrine of future retribution. I have no doubt this is so. But, after all, is this decisive? Are Mr. ----'s doubts and denials more to be relied on than the positive beliefs of as intelligent and good men as the world has ever seen? I do not press this as proof one way or the other, but it is something worth thinking of before you give up for ever your respect for Christianity and the Bible. Your letter has called up memories that will not down at the bidding. You remember your mother; you remember her life; you remember her death. The day after her burial we were sitting, you and I, under the old willow on the bank of the river--it is all before me now--and you told me how she died with her hand on your head, and how before she died you promised to meet her again. Was it all a delusion? Did she go out in final darkness? And was your promise the folly of childhood?