Breakers and granite / by John Gould Fletcher [electronic text]

THE OLD SOUTH

THE OLD SOUTH

High streaks of cottony-white cloud fill the sky. The sun slips out of the swamp swinging his heavy-jewelled mace before his face as he plays with the ripples that gurgle under the rotting cypress-knees. The breeze lifts the Spanish moss an instant and then is still. The sun tosses dew over the ragged palmetto-leaves. Aslant on a gush of warm breeze from the broiling savannah, the song of a mockingbird floats, a fierce scurry of notes, through the air. The sun seems to be kindling a flare at every point of the horizon. Grasshoppers, crickets, cicadas, everything that flits or skims, tunes and trills its shrill violin. Butterflies flutter, broken motes of colour; hummingbird and dragon-fly dart green streaks through the quivering sky.

The river rolls, boiling and frothing through the lowlands. It is weary of the dull stiff mudbanks that flake away before it in sticky chips; weary of the turbid masses of mud that it must scour away, to make its path. down to the sea. It gulps and seethes horribly with hungry angry lips, fretting

first one bank, then another, as it goes sliding and flopping down the long twisted bends in the fierce glare of morning, deceived no longer at each marshoutlet and creek and bayou-mouth into thinking that here and not further south must be the clear blue water it seeks, where its heavy burden may fall in peace. The river goes slapping, lapping, rustling the canes of the brake and the motionless cypress-trees. A mocking-bird's song floats down before it in the breeze.

It is noon and the carnival, king of fools, rules the city. A beautiful woman, her face cold, haughty, expressionless, the fire in her eyes half hidden, goes dancing down the street with a man whose shape is like an ape. Her feet stir the dust and it glitters as it settles in streams over her shoulders, like slipping confetti-showers. She is a flower over-weary of the sun. Her perfume is almost gone, and the fever will soon snap her from her stalk and toss her into the tomb. Bass drums toll to her tripping movement. Her skirts sway. Amid their flickering spangles plays a satyr, grinning at the multitude. He tears off her frills and flings them into the gutter choked with filth. Her half-naked form,writhes and recoils like a tree before the storm.

The river frowns and lours for a heavy, fuming dull blue shower races gloomily above it from the northward. As it goes it throws out at the trees tentacles of curled coppery lightning that enlace and line the branches and send them crashing downwards with full powdery explosions of muffled thunder. The river lashes itself into fits, smashing the bank with maddened fists, as it spins the quivering steamer around and nearly sends it reeling aground. It growls, it howls, it shouts its terror of the forest whose broken logs topple into it with a great splash, swirling and whirling, sucked and crashing in sudden black somersaults, while the storm roars and grumbles away with spattered hailbullets and noise of affray. Now the forest groans and drips and shrieks with rain that whistles through its branches. Every trickle, every pool, every creek is full. The choked up torrent overflows and covers miles on miles of furrows and woods with endless glaring wastes of water. A gaunt pine fails with a sigh and a splash.

Slowly the river resumes its patient march through the lowlands. Now autumn comes, and afternoon seems throwing grey filaments of haze from tree to tree. The old plantation sleeps, for it has nothing else to do. Live-oaks are bowered

about it, drooping heavily, weary of holding up lusty green leaves from year to year. In graves under the live oaks many are sleeping. They have slipped from the dream of life to the dream of death. Perhaps they died for a woman's sake, for a sigh, a chance word, a look, a letter, for nothing, or for a song that men sing. What matter? Life is a dream; to-day, to-morrow, yesterday, it is the same. Along old floors underneath mouldering doors blow light gusts of wind stirring the dust. A mouse cheeps in a corner. Old age creeps upon us, and life is grey. The old plantation moulders, day on day. Soon there will be gaps in the floors and the doors will swing open to all. Let us doze on the levee and feel the breeze as it slips down the river running past us.

The river runs very fast, for it is bearing sodden logs, like broken lives. The sleepy vultures line the grey cottonwoods that tower above its banks. To them, too, life is a dream. This morning they tore the rank carrion of a dead horse that floated down to them. Death does not matter, for life is defeat, but it is very sweet to have plenty to eat and to sleep in the sunlight. Sleeping and waking and sleeping again, that is how one learns to live without pain. Let autumn throw thin filaments

of regret from tree to tree. Leaves may drop slowly, but the live oak which drops not its leaves at all is the tree that is planted on graves.

Immortal death is very sweetWhen brown leaves fill the dripping gapof a broken vault, and the frightened feetof mice pit-patter, and owls flapOut to the cool moonshiny night,Which scatters crushed jewels down the river;While trees, dumb-stricken ghosts in flight,Chatter and shake against each other.

Tinkle — tinkle—drop; the rain that filters through the leaky roof. Under the colonnade where slaves were sold and bars chinked with gold runs a tiny stream of water through the dust. Was that a door slamming or only a torn hanging that flapped? Who knows? Perhaps it was two ghosts who chattered together through agued lips and rattling teeth? Not a dusty bottle in the bar. Marks of muddy boots on the smashed marble. Wind that laughs insanely up the spiral stairways, down the floorless corridors. Let us go, for rain is dropping and the roof is leaking, and I seem to hear a grey frog hopping while yonder door is

creaking as if someone were locked behind it and were whispering to get out. Let us go, for the ceiling sags and will soon be falling, and a black spider is crawling past my face, and rags are drifting about on the floor. Let us go, for a crazy deaf woman with a bent stick, threatens us in quavering voice, declaring she will strike us for daring to enter her palace. Let us go and not come back any more. The dead are best dead and forgotten.

The river rolls through fields blossoming with cotton day after day. In a crazy cabin someone is crooning a song. The sun lifts his long jewelled mace an instant, in careless lazy fingers, before his face and lets it slip away again. Aslant on a chill scurry of rain floats a mocking-bird's jangled song. It dies away and leaves only silence, half-enclosing the monotonous drone of a sad hymn of despair which a sleepy negro is humming to himself from nowhere.

January, 1915.

THE GREAT RIVER

I

Out of a bank of blue-black clouds to northward, Winding between two high red bluffs, a river Spreads out, a mile across from bank to bank, Its sheet of moving water.

It has been here when into silent forests The Indians came and lit their council-fires, And sought new hunting-grounds and sharpened arrows, Or gathered on these high red bluffs to pray;

It flowed on still when the first French explorers, Marquette the priest and Joliet the bold, Paddled upon it down from spring; to winter; Seekfag its mouth. in the Vermilion Sea;

It stood at flood-tide while the northern armies Battered with shell the brown clay bluffs of Vicksburg.

It will flow still when the last white man, lonely, Gazes upon its shrunken altered depths.

It goes, it flows, Mile-wide, continually curving, steady, silent. Taking the yellow-brown streams of east and west Forever in its splendid onward march.

. . . . . . .

Thunder has worked upon these cliffs, Thunder has carved these taill red sandstone pillars, Has split the solid rock, Has made the river follow where it will.

Low Indian drums of thunder, And the howling of winds in the autumn, Have bowed and broken the forest Time after time;

And yet, child of the woods, The river goes, carrying away to southward, Where far away the blue Gulf will receive it, Its burden of brown earth.

It rises out of thunder, It sweeps the prairie headlands rolling eastward,

The Missouri whirls into it its treacherous brown current, Afar it glides, and then it sinks to earth.

.......

Here where men's dreams Of empire rotted, washed away, I lie at ease upon the bank And watch the chips, and logs and bits of grass Go southward, fast descending.

Here where De Soto's heart Broke, when he found his westward pathway barred; Here where La Salle planted a lillied flag, And dreamed his great dream, levelled soon to dust:

Here where my fathers crossed, Broad-shouldered Tennesseans bearing in them.the fibre To carve out new farms from the valleys westward, I lie at ease and question my sad heart.

Has the land failed, Or will it rise some day to fresh endeavor? Though I, the last one of my name and race, Be lost across the seas?

Still flows the shining river And in its flowing, thus it speaks to me; "Endure, and in your constant daily striving, Carve out somewhere the stuff of new-made kingdoms, Though no man heeds them, though hopes turn to dust."

. . . . . . .

Lift a last council-fire Upon this ragged bluff Two hundred feet aloft, Rising above the great bends to the southward.

Lift a plumed long grey smoke, And summon everywhere men's hearts to solemn council. Lift alast council-fire, And let us speak at last.

We who are broken, lost, Still carry in our hearts some dream of finer fibre, Still clearly shape some vision of new flame, To mock this sordid and slave-ridden earth.

And we will gather When the great council calls us in the autumn,

To seek out once again some far-off kingdom Unconquered yet, yet never wholly lost.

II

With flashes of lightning striding above its surface, From the great white sagging masses of cloud that go to eastward, When the earth holds its breath from a-day of windless heat, So as I saw it once, I see the river now.

A vast brown rounded sweep of moving water, Quitting the red prairie slopes for the bottom lands to southward; Crumbling the clay face of the bank, creating lagoons and islands, Where the lone white heron plumes herself amid down-sagging vines.

. . . . . . .

Slowly the summer wanes, and slowly slackens the river; Logs that were piled up in spring roost on the sandbars at autumn,

Fever has passed through the land, the leaf turns yellow; Slowly the seasons pass;

And there beyond the weedy green levee Sweeping in curve on curve against the tangled frieze of forest, The river goes when haze wraps up the twilight, Towards the land of ghosts:

Buffaloes, snorting, trample their way to its shallows; Flocks of wild pigeon darken the skies at sunset; Tangle of matted vines cast into it red berries, Forests long gone writhe still gaunt branches at the sky.

And, underneath the bluff, Where the banks are eaten away, Trees one by one drop slowly into its current, Each one a tilt, a reeling collapse; a fall.

Darker and still more dark The years become;

Tightening the horizon nightly, cities rise, Their smoke is laced tog/ther by banks and bridges of steel.

But still the river flows, And still it bears away with it Flowers and leaves and trees, the years, the hours, the seasons, Towards the grey sea of the ghosts to southward.

. . . . . . .

I saw in midwinter the white mists arising, From your surface still shining, still moving steadily on. I saw in midwinter the wild duck at daybreak Emerge from your reeds;

I saw in midwinter the plumes of the cypress Like smoke of campfires lost, still black in the daybreak. The sweetgum dropped its final scarlet star: — From sleepless night I rose and faced the dawn.

. . . . . . .

String after string of bubbles and of foam, The years go, on, and we who go with them Are driftwood, floating weeds, Borne outwards whither?

Can we not wait, Have we no force to bear This great dull stretch of earth and water mingled Until there rise for us the floods of spring?

Until there come to us The great release, the surging melting waters,That send us speeding to our goal With doubly-hurrying feet?

Have we no power to find Space beyond space of shining perfect freedom,Sweeping us on beyond flat reefs of failure, Quickened and shining, to the perfect light?

III

Full moon at midnight, Flinging across the river your scarf of filmy silver, Making the eddies dance beneath your feet, Bring to me my loved one in the night!

Katydid, cricket, Bullfrog and treefrog piping in loud chorus, Whip-poor-will and baying hound, Bring to me my loved one in the night!

Owl that in the branches Screeches loud, then in the hush Hoots softly to the solemn moon, Bring to me my loved one in the night!

Night of the passionate south, Crush all the river under your big kisses, Make her to sink beneath the mad embrace Of the white blazing moon!

. . . . . . .

Where is the wind tonight? The moon glides across the river, That glitters emptily beneath it Eddy on eddy, mile on mile of light.

I have cried out to the forest, And not a leaf answered me; I have spoken in vain to the long-leaved feathery pine-trees, Where is the wind tonight?

Steadily out of the gulf He comes, the lover from the darkness; Rocking the branches, Breaking in ripple on ripple the moonpath up to southward.

Come, rushing breeze of the darkness, scented with earth and her flowers, Blot out quickly for me that low hung orange star, Send frightened clouds scurrying suddenly Over the face of the moon!

. . . . . . .

On the verandah rings the fiddle,'Twixt the columns feet are glancing, Couples glide and sway and turn Under the candles tall and white.

Spice-bush odours from the garden Drift between their rounded movements; Swishing skirts and flashing smiles Twirl and vanish to the shadows.

Fireflies signal here and there;On the lawn the honeylocust Lifts white pinnacles to the moonlight, And the bee-tree shuts her flowers.

When the dawn will rise and smite To white calm, the six great columns, Night will be a crushed rose, fading, And the memory of a kiss.

. . . . . . .

A steamboat steadily weaves From point to point in darkness; Churning up the moonlight in between To bubbles and streaks of foam.

Into the shadowy banks where racing flows the current, And out again across the glittering shallows, Dotted with bubbling eddies where the sand-shoal breaks away It weaves its steady path;

The steamboat glows and burns, Shooting out billowy smoke and sparks from her tall funnels: In the glare of her deck-furnaces Bronze crouching shapes are seen;

And weaving across, she suddenly toots one long blast; Heavily it reverberates across the sleeping river. For she has seen two miles across the moonpath, The low lights of a landing town to southward.

IV

No longer free, but parcelled out and shred, Amid swamp and bayou, chute, lagoon and canebrake, No longer wide, a slackened swirling river Above its clay-filled banks goes dragging past.

No longer free, but fettered in its movement, No longer wild, but bordered to the hem With fields of sugar, fields of rice, the smooth green leaves of cotton, It finds in slackening curves its weary way;

Too wild it was ever to reach the sea; Too vast it was to build a single outlet. It is lost in grey morasses Where rise the cypress-trees;

The sweetbay with its berries of bright red, The towering long leafed pine receives its waters. It came from forests and it goes to forests; Scarce half its waters find their goal at last.

. . . . . . .

We have not loved enough, Nothing has taught our hearts to love and suffer,

Ere our desires were shaped We shunned the patient earth.

We builded long ago White houses with tall columns, splashed in shadows. The spider weaves her web amid their splendours, The mice creep heedless over their gaping floors.

Now we build factories For the pleasures that too soon Will turn to bitterness upon our lips. We build them, till the air is grimed with dust;

And far away their fires Die in the tragic dawn of some tomorrow Which we will find too early or too late, Which we had better pray not come at all.

. . . . . . .

River that goes to death, Deep mournful sluggish river, Draping in crape of Spanish moss Your weedy green bayous;

You hide yourself in haze; The wild duck from the canebrake rises crying,

The hummingbird hangs quivering in the heat, Through the long autumn, squirrels mount the trees;

The pawpaw falls at dusk; Nuts in the foliage gleam, ungathered yet. The fox-grape and the smilax coil together, The wax-white mistletoe mounts the highest boughs;

And all in vain you spread Lagoon beyond lagoon, low island after island. The sea will take you quiefly at last, Whether you come there willingly or not.

. . . . . . .

It winds out oceanward; The brown stain of the earth goes mile on mile unfading, White sandbars are piled high with bits of trees, The current ploughs-great channels through the earth.

Afar off over shallows A lonely gull goes seeking for his kind, Green-brown, blue-green, the weedy smouldering sea Gnaws with its short sharp bursts upon the shore.

And far away to north Where the birch-forests glimmer by blue lakes, On high plateaus, where snow is late in dying, The shining river spreads anew its path.

Born of the forest and the cloud, It moves through a mile on mile of fertile valley; In deathless never-tiring strength it shapes All life within its bed, from birth to death.

July, 1920.

GETTYSBURG

I

Wild flowers bloom at Gettysburg; Violets in April line the hills; In May the dogwood shakes out starry branches, The trees put forth their young green daring leaves.

Wild flowers bloom at Gettysburg; Wild roses in fence-corners burst to bloom. Summer has come to Gettysburg, Summer has come at last.

The fields with rhododendron Pale-pink aflame on dark-green branches are: — Solomon's seal and clover riot in pasturelands, In the lush grasses, blown grasshoppers churr.

Suddenly, out of the south, Sulphurous with grey coils of smoke, Thunder clouds rise menacing, Burst on the summer, sweep her riot away.

Seventy-three thousand men march out: For sixty miles the hills Along the dark valley of the Cumberland Glow with bright campfires to the startled night.

Stuart with his grey cavalry Ten thousand strong, sweeps east to Harrisburg; Meade, hurriedly summoned to command, With his blue files plods steadily, slowly northward.

II

Wild flowers bloom at Gettysburg; Out of the darkness of the night two armies come together; As two great clouds, charged deep with summer rain, Might meet amid the hills.

In the long rolling country Covered with rounded spurs, divided by rich valleys, At early dawn the forces of the South Pour from the mountains downward to the plain.

The cavalry reel and crash: And now there opens wide the dawn of battle: —Under the July sun, just crawling up the sky, Grey puffs from batteries flash.

Backward the blue-clad army rolls from Gettysburg to southward,Till at the last they turn and hold in dense array, A tree-clad rocky height, a fish-hook spur bent backwards,With a low wall for breastwork: Cemetery Ridge.

The west burns up to red. The katydids and frogs begin their chorus. Soldiers light campfires, smoke and talk; One or two hold love-letters in their hands.

III

Darkness and brooding clouds In the closed tent of Lee; And the cry of the South goes out For victory at last.

The cry of the South ascends:— A long great bodiless cry,

That now has come the hour by late appointed, The moment to risk all.

Vicksburg holds still the river safe to south; But all the ports are rotting now and idle, And the flower of the Southern blood, drawn from the fields left fallow, Stands waiting underneath Lee's hand.

Lee prays in his tent at midnight: And in the White House, Abraham Lincoln prays. Each offering to some shaping force unseen, The terrible Cause they bear.

And in the silence of night The moon looks down on lines of troops advancing; Gleaming on file on file of bayonets, Lighting up line on line of grim, unshaven faces.

IV

Wild flowers bloom at Gettysburg, The dark Round Tops to south are thick with bushy sprays;

To north, Culp's Hill above its brook-filled valley Is gorgeous with new bloom: —

It is the second day; Lee hammers at the flanks. Longstreet, to South, swarms into Devil's Den. In the dense scrub men, panting,. fling themselves; Fighting with granite boulders, hand to hand.

Tree-branches tossed and torn Flicker above a scene of screaming faces — Men clash and grapple with their naked hands — Or lie upon the ground with bloody lips.

And three miles to the north, Ewell, with Louisiana troops, launches a mad charge, Straight out from Gettysburg Up the stiff slopes and spurs of woodgrown grey Culp's Hill.

Cannon on cannon wakes, The brooding July heat Is rent by lurid flashes; Victory comes at last.

V

Storms of the north and south, Rise in full strength on Gettysburg. Leap out, grey clouds, blue clouds, Rend this still heat away!

Winds of the west and east, Prepare yourselves, for once more wakes the battle, And in the brain of Lee Fierce hope exalts her sword.

Sunrise for the third time touches the peaks to westward, The hour has come, the day is here, the dial of time moves fast.

Facing each other a mile apart, the armies wait the onset, Between them rolls the valley with its trampled fields outspread.

From far away the thunders ride outstreaming; Muttering upon the horizon, they make their deadly way.

Gather, you masses of grey, for one last fierce upspringing, Waken, you guns of the South, and shape for them a passage.

Flash upon flash from brazen lips of flame— Two hundred cannon darken with smoke the fields.

The noon is past and now wanes afternoon Behind the grim line of their guns, Pickett's men wait their hour.

The thunder clouds have come together, A mile divides their crests; now the south breaks away!

Out of their rest they rise, Grey rank piled on grey rank, Hurtling up to the ridge Into the throats of the guns, Charging in stiff-held files Bent low to face their task, Leaping across the fields For a mile, into certain death.

Through ragged grey wisps of smoke they stumble, shift and waver, Between them the lightning flashes and the terrible peals of thunderRoar as the sky grows darker beneath the storm's great weight. In a leaden pall lit with lurid flashes the armies come to death.

Bullets sing, flicking the dust to puffs of angry brown. Volley on volley crackles, amid them the cannonflash Breaks and the line of the faces streams out from the sudden dark, Proud white ashen faces, bearing the Cross of the South.

Half of their way they have come, and still one third are standing Covered in blood they go onward, grey masses here and there.

And, along the stone-piled ridge, Under the throats of their guns,

The Northern troops, lying low, Wait with the bayonet.

Slashing with sabre and steel, they meet in melee and rally, Amid the clouds of smoke blown back by a sudden shift of wind. Under a gap in the wall, by a low hung clump of trees,They make the ground red with slaughter; Screams, yells, shots, oaths and-groans fill the hot quivering air.

VI

Wild flowers bloom at Gettysburg Between the young green wheat and the dense scrubby trees. Wounded men,writhing in their death-agony, Clutch at them in the grass.

Dying men stain their petals with bubbles and streaks of blood, The cause of the South is broken, the grey ranks melted away,

Barely one-quarter come staggering back from that charge, The rest lie silent, face-downwards in the grass.

Darkness and heavy rain; And in the nightThe tramp of a beaten army Is heard upon the roads, Like a low dirge of doom.

Lee silently rides amid them. His head is bowed, his face looks haggard and drawn. The flame of his hope reared high, now flickers out: And southward on that day brown Vicksburg falls.

Darkness and heavy rain And the dead men lying in darkness; The weight of a waning cause Drags Lee's soul down to earth.

VII

Fifty and seven years ago: — And now their graves lie still, Covered with flowers every spring. Here in this country's heart.

But we who hold the land, Think of them only now by fits and starts: — We are too busy with new conquests every day, To think of those grey shapes that charged to death.

But sometimes, a tall shadow Gets between us and the sunlight; Sometimes we seem to hear A hoarse voice shouting behind us in command.

Sometimes a broken sword of cloudSuddenly puts out the light for us, Sometimes we seem to hear Dark thunders muttering, vague and far away.

July—August, 1920.

THE PASSING OF T'HE SOUTH

On a catafalque, draped in black, under bronze cannon, forlorn and white, rigid in death, the corpse of the South is borne to its tomb. With muffled drums, With arms reversed, the veterans gather gaunt and grey, and their close-furled flags, 'neath the sun's pale flash, droop in weary folds today.

Eighteen hundred and sixty-one, and the sun shines gaily. The new levies of the North are swarming out from Washington, southwestward, to Bull Run. Listen to the drum as it rumble-bumbles through the woods, windless but cool, in the heat of July. Look at the clean blue uniforms, the epaulets, the brass buttons, the sashes with their thick gold braid. Let's go and picnic in the woods— who's afraid? "Our boys will shoot and the rebels will scoot, and day after to-morrow John Brown's body will be marching into Richmond. Then we'll hang Jeff Davies from a sour apple tree, as we go marching on." The sun flashes, but the leaves are silent. Suddenly the yell of a panther cuts the air, and from everywhere bursts out at once

grey smoke and the drumming roll of a volley. Little grey figures are stealing, out of the woods. They rise and shoot, disappear into the undergrowth, rise and shoot again, near and more near. And still rises more menacing that long scream of a cheer and a red banner, with long blue bars, studded with stars, bursts out of the woods and flickers through the smoke upon the left. "Fire —fire —for God's sake fire — what are you holding that gun for! Where—there—everywhere—the yell is on both sides of us —fire up in the air! Back —back— they are on our flank —make tracks for Washington —Father Abe is there —he will save us! Hoof-beats —cavalry — the cavalry are in pursuit — every man for himself—why don't they tall down when we shoot —May God curse that sun that glared in our faces —may the devil take this gun, it's too heavy to carry. Back —back —has any one thought of the flag — no, it's gone with the rest. Back — back to Washington!"

On a catafalque, draped in black, under bronze cannon, forlorn and white, rigid in death, the corpse of the South is borne to its tomb. With a low roll of drums and the dull tramp of feet, the procession starts, and it dribbles slowly down the long street, followed by sobs from broken hearts.

Eighteen hundred and sixty-two, and the new president of the Confederate States is present at a grand review of his army. From a fair knoll overlooking the scene, he sees afar the green fields, covered with long grey files of troops, a band of brothers assembled to defend the ascendant star of the South. Here are the cavalry of Virginia, men on blooded horses, which their orderlies have curried and groomed till they shine like silver. These are the men ready to ride for a jest into the cannon's mouth. Their sabres clink, and their horses curvet and prance and seem to curtsey as they dance in the sunlight. Here is the light artillery of Louisiana—the swamp-tigers, dark men, sitting erect on the caissons, rumbling at a gallop over the field. Here are the tall hunters from Tennessee and Arkansas, sallow, rangy men able to draw a bead on a squirrel's eye at thirty paces. Here comes, thundering and straining at the traces, the heavy artillery of South Carolina, the men who battered Fort Sumter, to pieces. They are singing of Charleston girls and the dust rises and curls about their wheels. The whole earth quivers and reels, and the President bows and smiles. The grey files of hoarsely singing men, swinging at a rapid pace out of the dust, seem like endless phantoms, turning and returning again.

The President rides forward and the movement of the troops is, stopped. "You are the seed-corn of the Confederacy," he says, "which we will plant in the North." A roar breaks forth and is blent with the baggage-wagons at the ends of the horizon. The whole army gives its assent.

On a catafalque, draped in black, under bronze cannon, forlorn and white, rigid in death, the corpse of the South is borne to its tomb. Boom! What was that? A far-off cannon. Boom! — they have reached the cemetery and the artillery is firing the last salute while the coffin draped in its single great flag is slowly lowered to the grave. The drooping banners, with their staffs shrouded in crape, are like great top, heavy flowers falling into the black hole in the ground. Boom!—old men used to battle hear that sound and they clutch with long bony hands their crutches, while the tears start. Boom! It is almost dark.

Eighteen hundred and sixty-three and Lee has a new plan. Grant is holding Vicksburg in a ring of fire and steel and the South is beginning to feel the pinch. The Mississippi is almost gone. Unless England comes soon to our help, we cannot fight on. Forward then, the South! In one last desperate effort, sweep up through Pennsylvania and

outflank the Capitol! Every night, men going to bed see afar the camp-fires of innumerable invading armies, like fireflies in the hills. Philadelphia fills with panic and the tramp of hastily drilling men. But on Seminary Ridge, before Gettysburg, Lee comes to a halt. There from Little Round Top to the Bloody Angle, stand the armies of Meade. Speak, guns! One hundred and twenty-five cannon fill the valley for three hours with swirling drifts of death. Now, then, Pickett, Longstreet, Heth! Forward —charge! Forward— charge! With bands playing and colours flying, dyeing the grass with their blood. "O, I'll live and die for Dixie — Hooray — Hooray —I'll live and die " —the wind bears the clamour away.

Dust that rises — dust that settles — and the rust of ancient years...

On a catafalque draped in black, under bronze cannon, forlorn and white, rigid in death, the corpse of the South is borne to its tomb.

1916.