to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us; that from those honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause, for which they gave the last, full measure of devotion; that we here resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this Nation, under God, shall have a new birth of Freedom, and that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth.-ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

A Faithful Color-Bearer.

In the lower hall of the State House on Beacon Hill, at Boston, where hang the treasures which Massachusetts soldiers brought back from many a bloody battle-field of the civil war, there is one pole from which the banner has been entirely torn away. That naked pole is not without its history. It was carried at Fort Wagner, at the head of the colored soldiers of Massachusetts. The color-bearer was wounded; his flag was torn by shot and shell. But he called out through the agony of dying men, clasping the naked staff to his bosom, crying over and over again: "It did not touch the ground! It did not touch the ground!"-LOUIS ALBERT BANKS.

Words of Warning.

Though we were greater than Venice or than Tyre, if we are not faithful to our high mission as a nation, our glory shall fade like the Tyrean dyes and crumble like the Venetian palaces.-DISRAELI.

A Patriot in Egypt.

What heart fails to sympathize with Ole Bull, the Norwegian violinist, who on his sixty-sixth birthday climbed to the top of the pyramid of Cheops and played the loved airs of the Norseman's home? With uncovered head, the wind stirring his white hair, he looked with clear, flashing eyes on the scene below. At his right lay the Valley of the Nile, the river sweeping through fields of ripening harvests. To the left lay the great Garden deserts, belted in by the Libyan mountains; before him the city of the Khedive, minareted and domed, the waste of sands and the Sphinx, stony-eyed and dreaming. In the presence of these, he touched the strings of the instrument and won from his tuneful bride" the songs of

massive ruins of Egypt

liberty. In the midst of the voluptuous, magnificent Egypt, that had for 4,000 years incarnated the scourge and doom of millions-he reached the height of a prophet of freedom, and gave utterance to the longing of the world's heart.-WESLEY R. DAVIS.

A Patriot's Dream.

I passed the last night in a sleepless dream. My soul wandered on the wings of the past back to my beloved bleeding Fatherland. In the dead of night, I saw dark, restless shapes with the paleness of eternal grief on their sad brows, walking through the grave-yards of Hungary and kneeling down upon the graves to deposit upon them their pious offerings of green cypress to the memory of the fallen.

I saw more. When the dark shapes had stolen away

I saw the dead half-risen from their tombs and gazing at the offerings. I heard them say: "Still cypress! Still no flower of joy? Is there still the chill of Winter and the gloom of night over thee, our Fatherland? Are we not yet avenged?" And suddenly the sky of the East reddened and boiled with bloody flames, and from the far West a lightning flashed like a star-spangled banner, and in its light a young eagle mounted, soaring toward the bloody flames of the East. As he drew near, upon his approaching the boiling flames changed into a radiant morning sun, and a voice from above was heard in answer to the question of the dead: "Sleep yet awhile! Mine is the vengeance. I will make the star of the West the sun of the East, and when ye next awake from your cold beds ye shall find the flowers there." Then the dead took the twigs of cypress, the sign of the resurrection, in their bony hands and laid them down again. -LOUIS KOSSUTH.

Decoration Day.

The Church should bless the soldiers for having by their blood atoned for the cowardice of the sanctuary. The pulpit should adorn the battle-fields that brought to them the unsullied Christ of Nazareth and Calvary. In the processions of this day the Church should march as a penitent full of regrets that, wearing the name of Jesus, it made such a poor estimate of the rights of man. Had the Church done its moral duty in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the nineteenth would have escaped the awful war of brother against brother, South against

North. When a religion espouses a great wrong, then the sword and the battle-field must come. Violence must .come when love has failed.

But while we meditate and stand with hands full of memorial wreaths the scene expands, the holy ground widens from State to State, from mountain to prairie and from ocean to lake and river, until at last the heart bows down in grief over the silent forms of 300,000 men. They gave up life that we might live more nobly. Of this number not many fell in instant death. Nearly all went out by the gate of long agony, asking help which could not come and thinking of the loved ones whom they would never see again. And all this suffering, all this dying, was for us who today are speaking the language and taking the footsteps and seeing all the scenes and joys in the sunshine of life! Decoration Day ought to come back as long as our mind can study political principles, and as long as our hearts can appreciate the self-denial of a soldier. Especially should the pulpit and the Church scatter flowers on the graves of the Union dead, for those awful battles and the awful carnage were planned by the blindness and weakness of religion. Christians in England opened a traffic in human bodies and souls. The pulpit was too weak or too ignorant to oppose slavery in its beginning.—SWING.

Washington.

Washington was destitute of the poetic sentiment. He saw a great end with wonderful distinctness, and the path to that end, and in the prosecution of this gigantic task

December and May were both one. He may have been thankful for flowers, but he did not complain about thorns. His heart was not easily broken. When his troops were hungry and in rags he spoke to them only the more kindly. When too feeble to fight he could retreat. He could wait as long as any general living. When the roads were good he advanced more easily; but when mud and snow were deep he still advanced. When the great Benedict Arnold, one of his most trusted friends, betrayed a most valuable garrison Washington closed up the open gate in a few hours. When Congress was without sense and without skill, Washington was on hand with both, at all hours, with a wisdom that never left him for a moment in seven years. Never before had the world seen such a clear grasp of the value of human liberty and such a uniform realization of means to an end. teor.

He lived
In a

His mind did not flash like a cannon or like a meIt poured out constantly, like the sun. The calmness which he possessed was not that of insensibility, but it was that of an unchanging power. in a group of years in which each day was great. time when a little republic was lying under the wheels of old iron chariots, how could any small hours come? The age not only lifted Washington up to a high level, but it compelled him to remain there until he was taken down for burial. Even when he retired to Mount Vernon to find years of peace, the Nation followed him and made him act as chief of the army, and of an army the most illustrious of any that had ever carried spear or gun. His heart failed but once, and that was when he sunk in