Page:The leopard's spots - a romance of the white man's burden-1865-1900 (IA leopardsspotsrom00dixo).pdf/236

 over to the National Cemetery across the way and each taking a basket, walked past the long lines of the dead their boys had fought and dropped a single rose on every soldier's grave. They were women whose boys were buried in strange lands in lonely unmarked trenches. They were doing now what they hoped some woman's hand would do for their lost heroes.

The crowd silently gathered around the speakers' stand and took their seats in the benches placed beneath the trees.

Gaston had never seen this ceremony so lavishly and beautifully performed before. He was overwhelmed with emotion. His father's straight soldierly figure rose before him in imagination, and with him all the silent hosts that now bivouacked with the dead. His soul was melted with the infinite pathos and pity of it all.

He had intended to say some sharp epigrammatic things that would cut the chronic moss-backs that cling to the platforms on such occasions. But somehow when he began they were melted out of his speech. He spoke with a tenderness and reverence that stilled the crowd in a moment like low music.

His tribute to the dead was a poem of rhythmic and exalted thoughts. The occasion was to him an inspiration and the people hung breathless on his words. His voice was never strained but was penetrated and thrilled with thought packed until it burst into the flame of speech. He felt with conscious power his mastery of his audience. He was surprised at his own mood of extraordinary tenderness as he felt his being softened by that oldest religion of the ages, the worship of the dead—as old as sorrow and as everlasting as death! He was for the moment clay in the hands of some mightier spirit above him.

He had spoken perhaps fifteen minutes when suddenly,