“Victory—­yes! and happiness,
      Kind comrade, to me and to you,
    When such rich spoil has crown’d our toil
      And proved the day-dream true;
    With hearty acclaim how we hail’d by his name
      The Caesar of that coin,
    And told with a shout his titles out,
      And drank his health in wine!

    “And then how blest the noon-day rest,
      Reclin’d on a grassy bank,
    With hungry cheer and the brave old beer,
      Better than Odin drank;
    And the secret balm of the spirit at calm,
      And poetry, hope, and health,—­
    Ay, have I not found in that rare ground
      A mine of more than wealth?”

Another long-time friend also of the antiquarian sort was Walter Hawkins, with whom I was intimate for many years.  His private collection of coins and curiosities was even larger and costlier than Nightingale’s, and was given by his administratrix to the United Service Museum, where I believe the bulk of it (perhaps morally mine) still remains in cases not yet unpacked.  He died suddenly, to my great financial loss; for he was very fond of me, offering himself sponsor and giving his name to a son of mine; and as a rich old bachelor he used, to make humorously half promises of benefits to come.  In fact, he had called in his lawyer to take instructions for a new will, and partly at least had erased or destroyed the old one of a twelve years agone, when, one raw and wintry morning, he insisted upon seeing a lady from and to her carriage without his hat (punctilio being his forte and his fault), caught cold, took to his bed, and was dead in four days!  Accordingly a relative with whom he had not been on the best of terms for years, administered to his half will, and succeeded to his possessions.  Such is life and its futile expectations.

Walter Hawkins had many peculiarities:  one was this.  At great cost he was long building for himself a tomb at Kensal Green, which he would not let me see till it was finished:  he then triumphantly exhibited to my astonished eyes a domed marble temple with four bronze angels blowing trumpets east, west, north, and south,—­and waited for my approval, which honestly I could not give.  I heard nothing more of this small mausoleum, for he was a taciturn man:  but when, some year or two after, I went to his funeral and looked in vain for the temple-tomb, I found it had vanished, and in its stead was a plain marble slab with his simple name and birthday on it, and a blank left for the date of his death.  Manifestly he had repented of the vaingloriousness of those herald angels and their dome; and practically took the hint of my dispraise in the adoption of that humbler tombstone.