[Passages from the poem to be read before the Society of the Army of the Potomac, at Gettysburg, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the battle, July 3, 1888.] That should have moved with slow, averted head Knowing what streams of pure blood shed, At dawn, like monster mastiffs baying, That eagerly and undismayed Forth and back, with bayonets biting; Disturbs the air: Only the insect-chorus faintly hums, Chirping around the dull yet sleepless dead, Forgotten fragments left in hurried flight; Forms that, a few hours since, were human creatures, VOL. IV.-13 Or stamped with blank despair; Or with dumb faces smiling as for gladness, Of motionless, inert, and hopeless sadness. To write the annals of renown II. All is quiet till one o'clock: Then the hundred and fifty guns, Metal loaded with metal in tons, Massed by Lee, send out their shock: Thousands and thousands flings onward, as if he sent Steadily sure his division advances, Gay as the light on its weapons that dances. The doom that it carries foretell: Show me in all the world anything braver Than the bold sweep of his fearless battalions Armistead, Kemper and Pettigrew With knightly power to lead a multitude The Ridge was wreathed with angry fire, Who perished for our dear land's sake. Mirroring heaven, to make another day. The splendor of strength that Gettysburg knew III. (REQUIEM.) Dear are the dead we weep for; All that we feel of meetest, Here we bring for the rarest Doers, whose souls rose fleetest Ranked with the truest and sweetest. Days with fiery-hearted, bold advances; Nights in dim and shadowy, swift retreat; Happy birds from leafy coverts calling; These go on, yet none of these you know; Nor the psalm of a land that rejoices, Ringing from churches and cities and foundries its mighty refrain! But the sun and the birds, and the frost, and the breezes that blow When tempests are striving and lightnings of heaven are spent, With one consent Make unto them Two hostile bullets in mid-air And swift were locked Forever in a firm embrace. Then let us men have so much grace, To take the bullets' place And learn that we are held By laws that weld Our hearts together! As once we battled hand to hand, In storm and mist, or calm translucent weather: Filling our minds again With the spirit of those who wrought in the Field of the Flower of Men! CHAPTER XXI. FIRST HARVESTS. By F. J. Stimson. A HOUSE BUILT WITH HANDS. HARLIE TOWNLEY'S ways were not like the ways of other young stock-brokers. He worked at the most unusual times, and usually made ostentation of idleness. Many others much delighted him by thinking him a fool, chiefly because he wore a single eye-glass; and had a drawl, up-town. He had begun the summerin the latter part of May, after Arthur had gone to Mrs. Gower's-by showing a considerable amount of attention to no greater a person than Miss Mamie Livingstone; thereby delighting her (as yet rudimentary) soul. The rest of his mind seemed given, as usual, to his person, his other equipages, and the various fashionable meetings of the season. His homage to Miss Mamie had been of the ostentatious variety, rendered at races and at horse-shows. He had even invited her to drive out to the Hill-andDale Club with him in his dog-cart; and it had only been as a favor reluctantly accorded to Gracie that she had not gone. Mamie was convinced that such an expedition would make her the most talked of débutante of the coming season; and she knew that in society (as perhaps in other things to-day) the main element of success is advertisement. When an article has once attracted notice, a clever person can make that notice favorable or the reverse almost at will. But Gracie was gaining a very powerful influence over Mamie-almost as powerful as all the world outside. Her parents possessed none; they were not only of a previous generation, but ex officio prejudiced advisers; the girl of the period holds their evidence almost as cheaply as the business man holds his minister's upon theological subjects. Herein also was she a girl of our age, when men go to Ingersoll and Tyndall for their theories of the unknown God, and their wives to faith-cures and esoteric Buddhism for the practice of Christianity, and leave the outworn Scriptures. Still, a nature like Gracie's had its effect, even upon a girl like Mamie. She was too quick not to be conscious of this, and sought to make it up by chaffing and patronizing her elder cousin. When Gracie persuaded Mamie to go with her to Great Barrington, Charlie was left entirely to his own devices. Some reader may say, his vices; but Charlie was not more vicious than another. He was almost alone-always excepting Mr. Phineas Tamms-in the office that summer. He showed, nevertheless, no desire to get away, but manifested a very strict attention to business. If Arthur had but known it, he had only been asked in Charlie's place upon the coaching party; but Charlie was one who never made himself the cause of another's knowing a disagreeable fact. He had his room permanently taken at Manhattan Beach; and he divided his leisure between this and divers clubs, urban and suburban. Occasionally he passed a Sunday on the yacht of an acquaintance. Old Mr. Townley still dropped into the office two or three times a week; he still fancied their reputation unchanged, and the business the same as in the old concern of Charles Townley & Son, before they had helped young Tamms out of difficulties and given him a clerkship in the firm; and he bobbed his gray head sagely over Tamms's exposition of his plans. Business was quiet enough. But after the old gentleman had fairly gone to Newport for the summer, things seemed to take a little start. Tamms's family were away, his wife and two showy daughters travelling in Europe by themselves, and spending a great deal of money. Tamms himself lived at a small hotel down at Long Branch, where he had his private wire, and where he would occasionally rest a day in rustic seclusion, having his mail and stock-reports brought down to him to read. For Tamms never read books: like Mrs. Gower, he preferred the realities. One day early in August Charlie was invited to go down and spend the night with his master, "the Governor," as Charlie termed him. He marvelled much at this, and went with much curiosity, never having witnessed any of Mr. Tamms's domestic arrangements. He knew that Tamms's womankind were travelling abroad; for he had had frequent occasion to cash their drafts. He had often speculated at their lack of social ambition on this side the ocean, and had come to the conclusion that it was either because they thought it easier "over there," or because Tamms deemed the time had not come for that as yet. But if not, why not? Charlie took a little leather satchel with him, filled with railway reports, letters, telegrams, prospectuses, and other business documents. His dressingcase went by express. The boat was crammed with excursionists, clerks and their female friends, common people, as Charlie would have called them, evidently going down and back for the sail. Charlie secured a stool upon the upper deck, lit a cigar, and buried his thoughts in the stock-report of the afternoon paper; while the steamer made its way down the teeming harbor, by the base of the statue of Liberty, then being erected, past a Russian man-of-war, and through the green-shored Narrows. To a patriot turned pessimist, there is something typical in the Jersey shore, the first American coast one sees in coming from the other world. Think of the last coast you leave-Cornwall, for instance with its bold rocks, its glorious cliffs, its lofty castles that have been strongholds, at least, of courage and of faith; fit selvage for a land which sometime felt the nobility and the sacrifice of life. And then look at the long, low, monotonous strip of sand, the ragged, mean bank of crumbling clay, where the continent merely seems, as it were, sawed off, and ends with as little majesty as some new railway embankment. On the little bluff a gaudy row of cheap, undurable houses and hotels; even the sea seems but an anticlimax, a necessary but uninspiring end of things, devoid of dignity if not of danger. But the Jersey shore is not the coast of all the continent, nor is the city of New York America. Charlie was not troubled by these things; they seemed as natural to him as the pink strip that marks the boundary of an atlas map. New York was an excellent place to make money in; and these things go well with materialism. The boat made its landing, and Charlie walked up the long pier through the crowd-a crowd of summer boarders, seeking rest, and who, finding overmuch repose, had come down to see the evening steamer land, for the sake of excitement. The great rollers foamed in beneath the pier, lashing the piles indignantly; and the sea on either side was speckled with bathers-children, men, and women, the last looking their unloveliest in bathing-gowns. The avenue at the pier-head was crammed with carriages-ladies, bored with the long day, who had come there for the last faint simulacrum of pleasure that the being seen in their own equipages still afforded them; other ladies waiting for their tired husbands from the city. In a handsome victoria with two long-tailed horses Charlie made out his host; and throwing up his overcoat and satchel, took his seat beside him. "Hot in town?" said Tamms, laconically. "Beastly," answered Charlie. "We might as well take a drive, I suppose; there's nothing else to do before dinner." Charlie silently assented; and they took their way along the red-clay road; on the left the wooden walk and railing above the gullied bank that met the sea, on the right a long succession of eatinghouses and candy stores; then huge barracks of hotels, then fantastic wooden villas, which wildest fantasies of paint and stained shingles had sought to torture into architecture. Not a tree was to be seen; and the vast assemblage of human habitations in the sandy plain resembled more a village of prairie dogs |