Or he may come home a cripple, to be honoured and to be kept too (as he deserves to be) at his country's expense. But if he be a wise man he will not regret even the loss of a limb. That is a cheap price to pay for having gained what is worth all the limbs in a man's body, a clear conscience and a right life. "If thy hand offend thee cut it off." Better to enter into life halt and maimed, as many a gallant man has done in war time, than having two hands and two feet to be cast out. Or perhaps his grave is left behind there, upon those lonely Crimean downs, and his comrades are returning without him, and all whom he knew, and all whom he loved, are looking for him at home. There his grave is, and must be; and "the foe and the stranger will tread on his head, and they far away on the billow." But at least he has not died like Ahab--a shameful and pitiable death. He has done his work and conquered. He has died like a man, whom men honour. Even so it is well. And if he have died in the Lord, a penitent Christian man, _he_ is not dead at all. _He_ does not lie in that grave in a foreign land. All of him that strangers' feet can tread upon is but what we called his body; and yet which was not even his body, but the mere husk and shell of him, the flesh and bones with which his body was clothed in this life; while he, he himself, is nearer God than ever, and nearer, too, than ever to his comrades who seem to have left him, and to the parents and the friends who are weeping for him at home. Ay, nearer to them, more able, I firmly believe, to help and comfort them, now that he is alive for ever, in the heaven of God, than he would if he were only alive here on the earth of God--more able perhaps to help them now by his prayers than he ever would have been by the labour of his hands. Be that as it may, Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord, for they rest from their labours, and their works do follow them. A fearful labour is the soldier's, and an ugly work; and he has done it; and doubt not it has followed him, and is recorded for him in the book of God for ever! XVII. WHAT IS CHANCE? "By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, because all have sinned."--ROMANS v. 12. All death is a solemn and fearful thing. When it comes to an old person, one cannot help feeling it often a release, and saying, "He has done his work--he has sorrowed out his sorrows, he has struggled his last struggle, and wept his last tear: let him go to his rest and be peaceful at last."