Sergeant Reed paraded his men,—­and wanted one or two more.  He came and asked Mr. Hughes for them,—­and he in turn told us very civilly, that, if “we knew our facings,” we might fall in.  Alas for the theory of the Landsturm! Alas for the fame of the Massachusetts militia!  Here are two of the “one hundred and fifty-two thousand eight hundred and fifty non-commissioned officers, musicians, artificers, and privates” whom Massachusetts that year registered at Washington,—­two soldiers for whom somebody, somewhere, has two cartridge-boxes, two muskets, two shoulder-straps, and the rest;—­here is an opportunity for them to show the gentlemen of a foreign service how much better we know our facings than they theirs,—­and, alas, the representative two do not know their facings at all!  We declined the invitation as courteously as it was offered.  Perhaps we thus escaped a prosecution under the Act of 1819, when we came home,—­for having entered the service of a foreign power.  Certainly we avoided the guilt of felony, in England; for it is felony for an alien to take any station of trust or honor under the Queen,—­and when Mr. Bates and Louis Napoleon were sworn in as special constables on the Chartists’ day, they might both have been tried for felony on the information of Fergus O’Connor, and sent to some Old Bailey or other.  None the less did we regret our ignorance of the facings, and, after a few minutes, sadly leave the field of glory.

My last visit to the Working-Men’s College was to attend one of Mr. Maurice’s Sunday-evening classes, and this was the only occasion when I ever appeared as a student.  It was held at nine in the evening,—­out of the way, therefore, of any Church-service.  There gathered nearly twenty young men, who seemed in most instances to be personally strangers to each other.  Mr. Maurice is so far an historical person that I have a right, I believe, to describe his appearance.  He must be about fifty years old now.  He looks as if he had done more than fifty years’ worth of work,—­and yet does not look older than that, on the whole.  His hair is growing white; his face shows traces of experience of more sorts than one, but is very gentle and winning in its expression, both in his welcome, and in the vivid conversation which is called his lecture.  He sat at a large table, and we gathered around it with our Testaments and note-books.  The subject was the fourth chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews,—­the conversation turning mostly, of course, on the “rest” which the people of God enter into.  This is not the place for a report of the exposition, at once completely devout and completely transcendental, by which this distinguished theologian lighted up this passage for that cluster of young men.  But I may say something of the manner of one so well known and so widely honored among a “present posterity” in America, for his works.  He read the chapter through,—­with a running commentary at first,—­blocking