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Show MEMORIAL DAY. Decoration day is here once more. It takes on new sanctity with every return. The advancing splendors of our Republic are constant reminders of the devoted ones whose sacrifices made these splendors possible. The day serves many notices on men. Those remaining of the royal band that returned from the great war are bent now and their steps have grown feeble. The inexorable years are swiftly performing their pitiless work. These old soldiers' brothers went down when flags were flashing, martial music playing, and great guns roaring, and they went under "the psalm of the guns to the Peace of God." Now, one after another, with no bugle to cheer, no standard on which to fix their closing eyes, they fall from the ranks. Every year there are more graves to dress, fewer hands to perform the pious duty. A little more and the last one of the glorified glori-fied host will be but a memory. Hence the obligation obliga-tion upon the living to keep their memories alive increases with the years. The needed hush and rest have come to them, but it is the need of the living to see that their graves be honored, their memories recalled. It is needed by men to keep their gratitude warm; it is needed by children that on their plastic hearts the impression be hardened that man's best love should be for his country, his highest duty to defend it when It is In peril. Children thus impressed do not falter when, after reaching manhood, any sacrifice Is required. It is a solemn pleasure to perform the rites of Memorial Day, where "the brave have sunk to rest, with all their country's honors blessed." The dressing of heroes' graves with flowers is like a mother's kiss upon the lips of her sleeping child. Tlhe child does not awake, but smiles pass over its face under the thrill of the kiss. The dead do not awaken, but who knows that they do not feel the thrill? Then who knows what shining hosts may, in their whiteness, be in ranks in the ether, to witness the ceremony? It is not hard to believe that they are watching watch-ing and smiling, that could our senses be subll-j subll-j mated we might see the august columns, hear phantom bugles and the roll of muffled drums, to catch the flash of standards whiter than a planet's light, above us. But the practical side Is all that ! 'jjs ours. We look out upon our country. No oth-gT oth-gT land so magnificent in power, so filled with mSSSwOKffKlMIWWIHMmittaamtamammiim imi mamnil promises of good, ever existed. No other millions of men so free and blessed as our own people ever before inhabited any country of the earth, nowhere else are men's hopes so high, their opportunities op-portunities so multiplied, their aggregate achievements achieve-ments so great. These are due to the men who framed our Republic; Re-public; to the men who died "to preserve us as a Nation." What the'n could possibly be so appropriate appro-priate as for the living men and women, once a year, to set aside a day on which to dress with flowers the graves of their heroic dead, and to renew re-new their vows of allegiance to native land? It links us with the past; it is an evidence of our worthiness to guard the treasure which the fathers bequeathed to us; it is an earnest that our children, growing up amid such surroundings, will be worthy to take up and gloriously carry on the 'free government of our country. The trumpet call of the day is, if our hearts are right, but an echo of the trumpets that heralded her-alded the birth and later the preservation of native na-tive land, and these echoes sounding on and on will be heard anew by each generation that rises Up to continue the work of planting the tree of liberty in the soil of a yet darkened world and it will be as at first when God said, "Let there be light," and looking, behold it will "be good." |