Not a ship that misbehaves, not a keel that grates the

ground,

Not a spar that comes to grief!

The peril, see, is past,

All are harbored to the last;

And just as Hervé Riel halloos " Anchor!" -sure as fate,

Up the English come, too late.

So the storm subsides to calm;

They see the green trees wave

On the heights o'erlooking Greve: Hearts that bled are stanched with balm. "Just our rapture to enhance,

Let the English rake the bay,

Gnash their teeth and glare askance

As they cannonade away!

Neath rampired Solidor pleasant riding on the Rance!' How hope succeeds despair on each captain's countenance! Outbursts all with one acccord,

This is Paradise for Hell!

Let France, let France's king

Thank the man that did the thing!"

What a shout, and all one word,

"Hervé Riel!"

As he stepped in front once more,
Not a symptom of surprise

In the frank blue Breton eyes,
Just the same man as before.

Then said Damfreville, "My friend,
I must speak out at the end,
Though I find the speaking hard:

Praise is deeper than the lips;
You have saved the king his ships,

You must name your own reward.
Faith, our sun was near eclipse!
Demand whate'er you will,

France remains your debtor still.

Ask to heart's content, and have! or

Damfreville."

my name's not

Then a beam of fun outbroke

On the bearded mouth that spoke,
As the honest heart laughed through

Those frank eyes of Breton blue:

66

Since I needs must say my say,

Since on board the duty's done,

And from Malo Roads to Croisic Point, what is it but a

run?

Since 'tis ask and have I may,

Since the others go ashore,

Come! A good whole holiday!

Leave to go and see my wife, whom I call the Belle Aurore!"

That he asked, and that he got,—nothing more.

Name and deed alike are lost;

Not a pillar nor a post

In his Croisic keeps alive the feat as it befell·

Not a head in white and black

On a single fishing smack

In memory of the man but for whom had gone to wrack
All that France saved from the fight whence England bore

the bell.

Go to Paris; rank on rank

Search the heroes flung pell-mell

On the Louvre, face and flank;

You shall look long enough ere you come to Hervé Riel.

So, for better and for worse,

Hervé Riel, accept my verse!

In my verse, Hervé Riel, do thou once more

Save the squadron, honor France, love thy wife the Belle

Aurore.

TO THE GRAND ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC

By THOMAS BRACKETT REED, Lawyer, Statesman; Member of Congress from Maine, 1877-99. Speaker of the 51st, 54th, and 55th Congresses. Born in Portland, Me., 1839; resides in New York City.

An address delivered at Grand Army Reunion, Old Orchard, Maine, August 7, 1884.

Comrades of the Grand Army of the Republic:-As a tribute to your worth and to your services, this vast and splendid audience, the largest on which my eye ever rested, surpasses any speeches we can possibly make. Free from all taint of ulterior purpose, spontaneous, natural as the tidal march of the ocean on the shore, it is a great throb of the popular heart beating in recognition of you and of your deeds. And why should not this throng of human beings pour from every hill and valley? They come to do honor to those noble qualities which have made human history in the past and human progress in the future possible. They are honoring their own better natures, their own higher attributes. War is a terrible misfortune, but some of the rarest virtues of humanity are evolved out of that crucible, white with the blinding heat of passion. All men rise to honor self-sacrifice, that noble quality which lifts us beyond our little personality and makes us part of the warp and woof of that race which has made the whole world blossom like the rose. All men rise to honor courage; not that brute fearlessness, born of ignorance and of the flesh, but that nobler courage, born of the soul, which faces not only death, but the long and terrible marches, the fever of wounds, the depression of defeat, and all the frightful experiences of that weary road which led to the glorious citadel of liberty, over which floats to-day in the serene upper air the flag of a land that knows no slave again forever. When Frederick the Great led his mighty army to the conquest of Silesia, his battalions marched and fought and conquered by the vigor of a discipline which had gone on for a quarter of a century.

When the troops of the German Empire set out for the campaign of Sadowa, a lifetime devoted to the exercises of war had made of them a machine fit to execute the will of

despotic power. Not thus your march.

Out of the midst The sight of human You went, not as

of your fellow citizens you stepped. blood had never filled your eyes. machines, but as men, to execute your own will and the will of the people. And when your work was done, silently, like the subsidence of one of the great forces of nature, you took your places among your fellow men to help produce for them and yourselves the comforts and necessities of life. Upon no grander spectacle has human history ever looked! What you have done and suffered has not gone without its recompense. It is ordained in the providence of God that good deeds contain the germ of their own reward. Another day than this has been consecrated to the memory of the dead; this day is consecrated to the tender companionship and fraternity of the living. What is the best good of life? It is not high station, or high honors. My friend who sits there [Mr. Blaine], who has had them all, will tell you that good-fellowship of friends and hearty comradeship is better than all place and fame. To be interlaced one with another in thoughts and hopes and sympathies is to become part and parcel of that eternal humanity which is so much greater and nobler than any of us poor atoms. Comrades, you have been welded together by the white heat of battle! To have lived together, to have suffered together, to have had great thoughts and to have done great deeds together, what solider foundation of friendship can there be on earth? It must outlast all time, and if it be true that on the other shore we take our characters and friendships where we leave them here, the great possibilities of reward in the future will transcend our highest hopes and our loftiest words.

DEDICATION OF GETTYSBURG CEMETERY

By ABRAHAM LINCOLN, Lawyer, Statesman; President of the United States, 1861-65. Born in Hardin County, Kentucky, 1809; died in Washington, D. C., 1865.

Delivered November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the cemetery in which were buried those slain in the battle of Gettysburg.

Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated— can long endure.

We are

We are met on a great battlefield of that war. met to dedicate a portion of it as the final resting-place of those who have given their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our power to add or to detract. The world will very little note nor long remember what we say here; but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work they have thus far so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us; that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.