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Show IZ56? Fourth. Over one hundred years ago, amid shrieking shell and brandished blade, a new nation was I born to freedom. Of all the great battlefields I of olden and later days, where empires have been transfigured and the destinies of human- l " kind revolutionized and reversed, amid the gen- H I I J erations to.be, Yorktown will shine before the H eyes of age and youth in the most transluscent 0 I j , mies. H I ' The echoes which began rolling when the H I ; first gun of the revolution was fired against the H I i overwhelming columns of the British hosts have H 1 , J sounded on and on until now a whole continent HB 1 throbs with the swelling volume of the triumph-H triumph-H I ' ant diapason of liberty. To the music of these H I ; strains a mighty people have marched to an un-Hj un-Hj I i ; v paralleled achievement. A broad land at tho H I ' j L shrines of which benignant nature had laid her H I choicest gifts, blossoms yearly into a wonderful Bj 1 i fruition; amid the verdure are temples of Indus-K Indus-K H f li try and peace, such as would never have blazed H i at the sky amid the tumult and the tyrannies H I 1 of the days of old, when the jewels of' intellect H 1 and the domiciles of liberty were trampled be-H be-H I J . neath the feet of warrior hosts. What wonder H I would not glow before the rapturous vision of H I ; i ' an ol( colonial musketeer of '74, if but for a mo-H mo-H I W" ment it were vouchsafed him to gaze upon the H I ;i granduer of the land which, by his unyielding B j devotion and Achillean, prowess, he wrested from H u 1; the gloom of tyranny and delivered to the archil arch-il ,1 !ij angels of progress and peace. He would see a ! " jr race of men With flashing eyes and heads lifted If proudly and high; men who breathing in the j azure of liberty and having never felt upon bowed ( heads the mailed hand of oppression, move among s their fellows, boldly and unafraid, even as a Greek god might have walked the verdant woodlands wood-lands of old Hellas, f Eyes dim with emotion turn today to where m old heroic days valor's fighting few beat back HI k j the invading tyrant and swept him on and on HI ' j until his shattered sceptre and bleeding coronet Hi j J were scattered in the sea; and through the un-H un-H t j folding years we see the monuments of the H If genius which flashed from Lexington to Santiago H , and lives on and on. H ' 1 And today the old Valkyrlan host is with us again. For their bivouacs are the temples of peace and their shrines the reverent hearts of a great nation. A. K. N. |