rough box mounted on crude rockers, each is at the threshold of life, and each represents the potentialities of human existence; that both may move along life's pathway with much in common, though so far apart; and at the end "death knocks with equal hand at the door of the cottage and the palace gate."

Many have taught that death was the great leveler, and that all are alike in His presence, but these have taught that in life there is a brotherhood of man, and that in this common humanity a fellow feeling should "make us wondrous kind."

No matter what our circumstances or state, if we have done our duty as best we may, 'tis well; and even though no trump of fame may sound our praise, or stamp of high degree be placed upon our names, with Burns we know "the rank is but the guinea's stamp" and "a man's a man for a' that and a' that."

As the traveler stands and looks at the cottage where Burns was born, how his heart throbs, and what a poetic inspiration awakens within him!

"Though Scotland boasts a thousand names

Of patriot, king and peer,

The noblest, grandest, of them all

Was loved and cradled here.

Here lived the gentle peasant-prince—
The loving cotter-king-

Compared with whom the greatest lord
Is but a titled thing.

"Tis but a cot roofed in with straw,

A hovel made of clay:

One door shuts out the snow and storm-
One window greets the day.

And yet I stand within this room

And hold all thrones in scorn;

For here, beneath this lowly thatch,
Love's sweetest bard was born.

"Within this hallowed hut I feel

Like one who clasps a shrine,
When the glad lips at last have touched
The something deemed divine.

And here the world through all the years,
As long as day returns,

The tribute of its love and tears

Will pay to Robert Burns."

-J. H. Lumpkin.

[An address delivered before the Burns Club of Atlanta.]

ULYSSES S. GRANT.

For the life of a mighty nation thus conceived by the patriots and sages of the Revolution and nurtured by the providence of God, this great American fought. It was for this, at Shiloh, with the river at the back of his torn and bleeding battalions, he scorned the thought of retreat. It was for this at Vicksburg he braved the miasma of the swamp, and the roar of the crevasse, until the levees along the river were but cities of the dead. For this he dared to cross the turbid floods of the Mississippi and like Cæsar at the siege of Alesia, interposed his command between two armies. For this he stormed the face of Mission Ridge. For this he led the massy columns of his brave soldiery into the gloomy shades of the wilderness, and entered upon the year of battles when the rifles were never voiceless and the dread artillery was scarcely hushed.

To this silent man, in his youth and simple young manhood, who had been evolving powers of which he himself was not aware, was accorded in the second year of his leadership the greatest military command under government the world has ever known. That his armies were tremendous is true, but other generals trained like him, with equal opportunities, had equal armies and they had all failed even as the sons of the ancient Hebrew passed before the prophet of God, and Samuel said: "The Lord had not chosen thee, but when David came, the Lord said arise, anoint him for this is he." And had he not foemen worthy of his steel? Who so ready as he to record his estimate of their constancy and their valor? The sincerity of their convictions he did not question. Here in his imperial state where the nobility of your manhood has given "bond in stone and ever during brass to guard and to immortalize" the ashes of the Confederate dead, here where lived your great commander who in his last recorded words declared that they deemed their principles dearer than life itself, it needs not that I should laud the manhood or defend the sincerity of Southern men. No affront would he permit, when they stacked arms, to the worn and wasted veterans of Lee. The great commander was in battle their sternest foe, their gentlest victor in defeat. "They are our countrymen now," he said to his gallant soldiers before the last wreath of smoke had floated away from the firing lines at Appomattox. How he kept his soldierly word to General Robert Edward Lee when the parole of that great soldier was threatened will forever endear his memory to Southern men. We are brethren now, shoulder to shoulder, under the glory-bright ensign of our common country, and I thank God that with the

clear vision of the dying the noble patriot whom we commemorate to-day, lived to this truth. In simple phrase and infinite pathos he wrote: "I feel that we are on the eve of a new era when there is to be great harmony between the Federal and Confederate. I can not stay to be a living witness to the correctness of this prophecy, but I feel it within me that it is to be so. The universal kind feeling expressed for me at a time when it was supposed that each day would prove my last seemed to me the beginning of the answer to 'Let us have peace.' With such emotions

in his heart, this great American died.

And, my countrymen, his prophetic words were true. Now in our country's need we are a reunited people. His magnanimity to Southern men, his soldierly fidelity to his great adversary has found its reward in the devotion to his country of that other Lee, who amid the curses and the treachery of the stealthy Spaniards, the pestilence among their victims and the cruel massacre of our sleeping sailors, with consummate courage and manliness has maintained the honor of the flag. Far to the South in the State of my birth and my love, in a park in beautiful Savannah, where soft winds from the Atlantic rustle the palms, swing the silver censers of the acacia, and disperse the fragrance of the magnolia and the rose, noble men and gentle women have reared a monument to the Confederate dead. On its face, taken from the grand poetry of Scripture, are these words:

"Come from the four winds, O breath,

And breathe upon the slain, that they may live."

The prayer has been granted. They live, oh, my countrymen, they live in millions of their gallant sons and

kinsmen, quickened into life and power as American citizens by the generosity of Grant, and the magnanimity of the nation he served, and in the day of our country's need, under the flag of our fathers, in even line with the veterans of the Union, and the noble manhood of the North, the ground shaking with their measured tread, and the cries of the enemy drowned by the rebel yell, clearing the way with their flaming volley, they will bear down. upon our country's foe. Then the truth will be seen of all men that the union which Washington fostered, and Grant did so much to save will be indeed perpetual, the greatest citadel of civil and religious liberty on earth, a glory to the Most High God and a blessing to humanity in all the years to come.-Judge Emory Speer.

[Extract from an address delivered at Galena in 1898 on the anniversary of the birth of General Ulysses S. Grant.]

THE MAN WITH HIS HAT IN HIS HAND.

On the day I received an invitation to address this distinguished gathering, chance took me to the Federal military post in the suburbs of my home city. The Twentyninth Regiment of United States volunteers, then quartered there, had that day received orders for their trip of ten thousand miles. The troops were formed in full regimental parade in the presence of thousands of spectators, among whom were anxious and weeping mothers, loving sisters and sweethearts, and a vast multitude of others who had gone to look, possibly for the last time, upon departing friends. Of the enlisted men a great percentage were from my own State, most of them from simple farm