After this little story, the inscription,
“And well these men maintained the right;
They kept the faith and fought the fight;
Till Might and Reason both
Fled fast before the oath
Which brought the God of Freedom’s battles down
To place on patriot’s brow the victor’s crown!”[[3]]
on the float was eagerly read and doubly appreciated. By the bell stood a tiny maid in the long skirt of the days of colonial childhood, wearing a long white apron. With the crossed kerchief and two bright eyes peeping from beneath the golden curls that strayed from below the little one’s Puritan cap, she looked so sweet and demure that murmurs of admiration surged through the crowd, as they recognized that this diminutive lady represented the first white child born in America, little Virginia Dare.
Perhaps only a few knew that the white fawn that she was holding by her side featured the legend of the white doe that was said to haunt the isle of Roanoke for many years after the return of John White, who found only the word Croatan to tell him that his dear little granddaughter had disappeared, never to be found. The legend was so suggestive of the romance of North Carolina that the girls could not forbear giving it prominence on the float. They had had some trouble to find a white doe, but they had succeeded, and as Nathalie gazed at it she was again reminded of how the legend told that it used to stand mournfully gazing out to sea, on a hill of the little isle. The Indians, tradition asserted, had failed to kill it, until one day it was shot and killed by a silver bullet from the hand of an Indian chieftain, who claimed that the bullet had been given to him by Queen Elizabeth to kill witches, when a captive in England. As the beautiful doe sank upon the green sward and expired it was said to have murmured, “Virginia Dare! Virginia Dare!”
South Carolina, glaringly conspicuous with red and blue bunting, was marked “Liberty” in honor of one of the most famous flags used in the Revolutionary War. It was an ensign of blue with a white crescent in one corner, said to have been designed by Colonel Moultrie, of Carolina fame, and was declared to have been the first flag raised for liberty in the South.
In the center of the float a miniature trench had been raised, on the parapet of which stood a young lad waving this little blue flag, in honor of that gallant hero, Sergeant Jasper, who, when the flag was shot down during the bombardment of Fort Moultrie, June 28, 1776, leaped fearlessly to the top of the ramparts, received the colors, and held them in his hand until another staff was found.
“Lo! the fullness of time has come,
And over all the exiles’ Western home
From sea to sea the flowers of Freedom bloom.”
This little quotation was an apt one, from the Poet Whittier, but it was not necessary to make known to those gazing at it, that it stood for the strongest and proudest of the sisterhood of States, the home of freemen and heroes, of Robert Morris, Dr. Franklin and our good brother, William Penn.
This promoter of tolerance, independence, and the equal rights of men was fittingly portrayed by a Boy Scout. Benignant of face, mild of eye, with long hair falling from beneath his broad-brimmed hat, this friend of the friendless stood surrounded by a group of Indian warriors, resplendent in all the trappings of their tribes, making one of the numerous peace treaties.
But the Georgia float, buried in white to represent bolls of cotton, in memory of Eli Whitney, aroused such loud and long cries of admiration that Nathalie feared that after her hard labor the other floats had not received their due mead of appreciation. But no, it was the rousing melody of “Marching through Georgia,” with its telling lines of,