While the days and the years roll by.
Let him sleep,
Sweetly sleep,
Till the call of the roll on high.
In the time of the war, in the dark hours of danger and distress, in the times of loss and appalling personal sorrow the Americans were very near and dear to God and to one another—nearer than they are to-day in their peace and prosperity.
When the hymn had been sung, an old grey-headed man came to the foot of the grave and read a portion of the speech made by Abraham Lincoln at the great cemetery at Gettysburg:
Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. We are now engaged in a great Civil War, testing whether that nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield ... to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who have given their lives that the nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But in a larger sense we cannot consecrate this ground. The dead themselves have consecrated it. It is rather for us, the living, to consecrate ourselves to the work they died for, that we resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.
The reading of these words was most impressive. I realised in it the Gospel of America—something more national than even the starry flag.
When the reading was accomplished the eight veterans fired their salute, not up at heaven, but across and over the people's heads, as at an unseen enemy. Then the old grey-headed man who had read the words of Lincoln pronounced the blessing: