Last Saturday was Memorial Day. With banners and bands, music and speech under the softest of May skies, and in its serenest airs tens of thousands of our soldiers’ graves were decorated with flowers. Most lovely was Arlington that day! No words could have been more eloquently fitting than those which were spoken; no music tenderer, nor fuller of precious memories, nor sweeter with suggestions of Heaven, than that sung under those patriarchal trees by fifty orphan children. And no sight could have been more touching than when these soldiers’ orphans laid their flower-wreaths down upon ten thousand soldiers’ graves. Yet the magnetism of the multitude was there. The tide followed the banners and the bands, the blooming maidens, the eloquent speech.
Miles out Seventh street, beyond Fort Stevens, there is a little cemetery where forty soldiers lie alone, who fell in defence of Washington. One of these was a poor widow’s son. She had three; and this was the last that she gave to her country. She, a poor widow, living far in northern Vermont, has never even seen the graves of her three soldier sons, whom she gave up, one by one, as they came to man’s estate; and who went forth from her love to return to it living no more.
To this little grave-yard on Seventh street one woman went alone with her children, carrying forty wreaths of May’s loveliest flowers, and laid one on every grave. Forty mother’s sons slept under the green turf; and one mother, in her large love, remembered and consecrated them all. She chose these because, with more than thirty thousand others in the larger cemeteries to be decorated, she feared the forty, in their isolation, might be forgotten. No others followed her; and this mother, alone with her children, scattering flowers in the silence of love upon those unremembered graves, some way wears a halo which does not shine about the multitude.
THE TOMB OF “THE UNKNOWN.”—ARLINGTON.
Erected by the Government to the memory of Unknown Soldiers killed during the War.
We look on Arlington through softest airs. How beautiful it is! how sad it is! how holy! Again the tender spring grasses have crept over its sixteen thousand graves. The innocents, the violets of the woods, are blooming over the heads of our brave. In the rear of the house a granite obelisk has been raised to the two thousand who sleep in one grave. Four cannon point from its summit, and on its face it bears this inscription:—
“Beneath this stone repose the bones of two thousand one hundred and eleven unknown soldiers, gathered after the war from the fields of Bull Run, and the route to the Rappahannock. Their bodies could not be identified, but their names and deaths are recorded in the archives of their country, and its grateful citizens honor them as their noble army of martyrs. May they rest in peace.”
The rooms and conservatories of the house are filled with luxurious plants, soon to be set out on the graves of this cemetery. Beauty and silence reign through this domain of the dead. There is a hush in the air, and a hush in the heart, as you walk through it, reading its names, pausing by the graves of its “unknown,” thinking of the past. Far as the sight reaches, stretch the long columns of immortal dead. The beauty of their sleeping-place, the reverent care covering it everywhere, tells how dear to the Nation’s heart is the dust of its heroes, how sacred the spot where they lie. In this let us not forget the still higher love which we owe them; let us attest it by a deeper devotion to the principles for which they died.
CHAPTER L.
THE LIFE AND CAREER OF JAMES A. GARFIELD, THE MARTYRED PRESIDENT.
The National Republican Convention of 1880—Nomination of James A. Garfield as President Hayes’s Successor—The History of His Life—His Humble Home—Death of His Father—Hardships and Privations of Pioneer Life—Struggles of His Mother to Support the Family—Splitting Fence Rails with her own Hands—The Future President’s Early School Days—Working as a Carpenter—Chopping Wood for a Living—Leaving Home—Life as a Canal Boat Boy—Narrow Escapes—Beginning His Education in Earnest—School Life at Chester—How He Paid His Own Way—First Meeting with his Future Wife—Early Religious Experience—Enters Williams College—Professor and President—His First Appearance in Politics—His Brilliant Military Record—His Services at Shiloh, Corinth, and Chickamauga—His Congressional Career—Republican Leader of the House of Representatives—He is Elected to the United States Senate—His Appearance as the Leader of the Sherman Forces at the Chicago Convention—He is Himself Nominated amid the Wildest Enthusiasm[Enthusiasm]—An Exciting Campaign—His Triumphant Election.