“Poor little souls,” we say; “how they did hullabaloo. One might have thought they were half-killed. And it was only a broken crown, after all. What a fuss children make!” We bear with much stoicism the fall of little Jack and little Jill. But when _we_—grown-up Jack with moustache turning grey; grown-up Jill with the first faint “crow’s feet” showing—when _we_ tumble down the hill, and _our_ pail is spilt. Ye Heavens! what a tragedy has happened. Put out the stars, turn off the sun, suspend the laws of nature. Mr. Jack and Mrs. Jill, coming down the hill—what they were doing on the hill we will not inquire—have slipped over a stone, placed there surely by the evil powers of the universe. Mr. Jack and Mrs. Jill have bumped their silly heads. Mr. Jack and Mrs. Jill have hurt their little hearts, and stand marvelling that the world can go about its business in the face of such disaster. Don’t take the matter quite so seriously, Jack and Jill. You have spilled your happiness, you must toil up the hill again and refill the pail. Carry it more carefully next time. What were you doing? Playing some fool’s trick, I’ll be bound. A laugh and a sigh, a kiss and good-bye, is our life. Is it worth so much fretting? It is a merry life on the whole. Courage, comrade. A campaign cannot be all drum and fife and stirrup-cup. The marching and the fighting must come into it somewhere. There are pleasant bivouacs among the vineyards, merry nights around the camp fires. White hands wave a welcome to us; bright eyes dim at our going. Would you run from the battle-music? What have you to complain of? Forward: the medal to some, the surgeon’s knife to others; to all of us, sooner or later, six feet of mother earth. What are you afraid of? Courage, comrade. There is a mean between basking through life with the smiling contentment of the alligator, and shivering through it with the aggressive sensibility of the Lama determined to die at every cross word. To bear it as a man we must also feel it as a man. My philosophic friend, seek not to comfort a brother standing by the coffin of his child with the cheery suggestion that it will be all the same a hundred years hence, because, for one thing, the observation is not true: the man is changed for all eternity—possibly for the better, but don’t add that. A soldier with a bullet in his neck is never quite the man he was. But he can laugh and he can talk, drink his wine and ride his horse. Now and again, towards evening, when the weather is trying, the sickness will come upon him. You will find him on a couch in a dark corner. “Hallo! old fellow, anything up?” “Oh, just a twinge, the old wound, you know. I will be better in a little while.”