Good Bye Mr.Chips Full Story

CHAPTER l
When you are getting on in years (but not ill, of course), you get very sleepy at times, and tKe~hours seem to pass like lazy cattle moyjng across a landscape was like that for Chips as the autumn term progressed and the days stoo&ened till it was actually dark enough to light the gas before call-over/-For .Chips, like some old sea-captain, still measured time by the signals of the past; and well Re might, for he lived at Mrs. Wickett's, just across the road from the school. He hajd been there more than a decade,ever sincere finally gave n his mastership; an,d it was Brookfield far more tharrGreenwich time that both he and his landlady kept, "Mrs. Wickett," Chips would sirt^but, in that jerky, high pitched voice that had still a good deal of sprightliness in it, "you might bring me a cup of tea befpre/prep., will you?"
When you are getting on in years it is nice to sit by the fire and drink a cup of tea and listen to the/school bell sounding dinner, call-over, prep, and lights out. Chips always wound up the clock after that last bell, then he put the wiie guard in front of the fire, turned out the gas, and carried a detective novel to bed. Rarely did he read more, than a page of it hpf^pa sleep came swiftly and peacefully, more like a mystic' intelisifymg ofj^ereejSfion than any changeful entrance into another world. For his days and nights were equally full of dreaming.
He was getting on in years (but not ill, of course); indeed. as DoctorMerivale said, there was really nothing the matter with him. "My.dear fellow,you're fitter than I am," Merivale would say, sirring a glass of sherry, when hecalled every fortnight or so. "You're past the age when people get these horriblediseases; you're one of the few lucky ones who're going to die a really natural/ death. That is, of course, if you die at all. You're such a remarkable old boy thatbne_neverJaxQws." But when Chips had a cold or when east winds roared over the fenlands, Merivale would sometimes take Mrs. Wickett aside in the lobby'and whisper: "Look after him, you know. His chest.... It puts a strain on hisheart. Nothing really wrong with him - only Anno Domini, but that's the mostfatal complaint of all, in the end "
Anno Domini.... Rry Jove, yes. Born in 1848 and taken to the Great Exhibition as a toddling child-not many people still alive could boast a thing like that. Besides, Chips could even remember Brookfield in Wetherby' s time. A phenomenon, that was. Wetherby had been an old man in those days-iSyo-easy to remember because of the Franco-Prussian War. Chips had put in for Brookfield after a year at Melbury, which he hadn't liked, because he had been .igged there a good deal. But Brookfield he had liked, almost from the beginning. He remembered that day of his preliminary interview - sunny july, with the air full of flower scents and the plick-plock of cricket on the- pitch. Brookfield was playing Barnhurst, and one of the Barnhurst boys, a