of Tom Thumb, and I do not
recall which succeeded. The tragedy was most extreme. In the closing
scene the entire cast underwent destruction, strewing the stage with
a picturesque heap of slain. We were not so very dead, for the victims
near the foot-lights in order to give the curtain room to fall,
drew up their legs or rolled out of the way, in a spirit of polite
accommodation. The most impressive part of the spectacle was the
defunct giantess, whose wide-spreading draperies and head-gear, as
Brooks came down with a well-studied crash, took up so much of the
floor that the rest of us had no room left to die in dignity. The
piece was so much of a success that we performed it again at the house
of Theodore Lyman, in Brookline,--and still again, at Chickering Hall
in Boston.

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
l