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THE BLUE AND THE GRAY

BY FRANCIS MILES FINCH

By the flow of the inland river,

Whence the fleets of iron have fled, Where the blades of the grave-grass quiver, Asleep are the ranks of the dead, Under the sod and the dew,

Waiting the judgment day,

Under the one, the Blue;

Under the other, the Gray.

These in the robings of glory,
Those in the gloom of defeat,
All with the battle-blood gory,
In the dusk of eternity meet,
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day,
Under the laurel, the Blue;

Under the willow, the Gray.

From the silence of sorrowful hours
The desolate mourners go,

Lovingly laden with flowers

Alike for the friend and the foe,
Under the sod and the dew,

Waiting the judgment day,

Under the roses, the Blue;

Under the lilies, the Gray.

So with an equal splendor

The morning sun-rays fall,
With a touch, impartially tender,
On the blossoms blooming for all,-
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day,
Broidered with gold, the Blue;
Mellowed with gold, the Gray.

So, when the Summer calleth,
On forest and field of grain
With an equal murmur falleth
The cooling drip of the rain,
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day,
Wet with the rain, the Blue;
Wet with the rain, the Gray.

are fading,

Sadly, but not with upbraiding,
The generous deed was done;
In the storm of the years that
No braver battle was won.
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day, -
Under the blossoms, the Blue,
Under the garlands, the Gray.

No more shall the war-cry sever,
Or the winding river be red;
They banish our anger forever

When they laurel the graves of our dead!
Under the sod and the dew,

Waiting the judgment day, -
Love and tears for the Blue,

Tears and love for the Gray.

A DAKOTA BLIZZARD

THE CONTRIBUTORS' CLUB

As the time for blizzards comes round again, I propose to invite the Club to meet at our camp in Rosebud Agency, southern Dakota. To prepare the minds of the members, let me recall our experience of last January. We knew before we got out of bed, in this little government schoolhouse, that the most awful storm we had ever witnessed was imminent. Lilia drew the curtain back from the window by the bed, to see if it were time to get up, and her exclamation brought me to the window at once. The sky was inky. In a few minutes, the storm began, and in half an hour it was at its height.

Lilia ventured a few yards out of the front door at its beginning, and was near not getting back. The wind struck her with such violence as to bring her head down to a level with her knees, and take away her breath. She said that she was near falling on her face, and she knew that if she fell she would not get up again. She got to the house, bent at the angle into which the wind had forced her.

The storm raged, without one moment's abatement or lull, during the whole day and far into the night, when we fell asleep. At first the little frame building creaked and shivered like a ship at sea, and we wondered how anything constructed by the hand of man could stand against that wind. After the first half hour,

it was impossible to distinguish the sound of groaning timbers, for the ears were filled with the rush of the elements. It was like the roar and surging of a mighty

ocean.

We were glad that we were not the first inhabitants, for we should have thought that the earth had slipped her orbit and was rushing through space, or that the Last Judgment was about to be ushered in.

Being in the house, we could see out a few yards on one side the side from which the storm did not come. On the other three sides, the snow beat and came in (though the house is close and tight), and went halfway across the schoolroom. It hung in a beautiful fringe, several inches long, from the drying-rope stretched across the room, and festooned the maps on the walls, and finally blocked up the windows till they were as impenetrable as snow-banks.

It was a comfort to us to believe, as we then did, that this greatest of all the blizzards had set in as early in other camps as in ours, and that no human being was exposed to its fury. No sun had risen over our heads on that day, and we had rung no school-bell; we could not know that bells were ringing from many a prairie schoolhouse, and that the fair promise of the day was luring men, women, and children to their doom. We were gazing, awestruck but calm, from our window, and saying that we wished for a photographer to picture forth the arctic interior of a government schoolhouse in a Dakota blizzard, and for an artist, great in portraying Nature's moods, to immortalize on canvas the tempest-tossed prairie without.

On the afternoon preceding this destructive day, no

snow fell, but the force of the wind was so great that it lifted up from the boundless prairie the accumulated drifts of weeks, and carried them along in great waves, so that the whole earth seemed in motion and rising heavenward. The outline of these vast billows and the intervening troughs, as seen against the horizon, was the most impressive sight that had ever met our eyes.

On the morning of the 13th, the mercury registered twenty-five degrees below zero, and the wind was blowing cruelly. The drifts between us and the village were so deep that we thought it unsafe to ring for the children. But they came over the half mile, through drifts waistdeep to large children, and the two faithful policemen, Stiff Arm and Cut Foot, came to see how we had got through the blizzard. (Cut Foot's name was a sore trouble to us when first we came to these Indians. When I called him or spoke to him, Cut Throat seemed invariably to slip off my tongue. Lilia objected seriously, but it was not till after some very plain words and several private rehearsals, that I finally got the right name fixed in my head.)

The schoolroom was not to be thought of on that bitter day, and we brought the children and the policemen into our bedroom to thaw out. We ran the mercury up to one hundred and ten degrees within two feet of the stove; at a distance of eight feet, it was ninety-five degrees lower. Not one of the children uttered a sound of complaint; but the big tears rolled silently down the swollen cheeks of one of the little girls when the genial warmth of the room began to make her comfortable. Presently the third policeman, One Feather, rode up from the Agency, fifteen miles distant. His nose was

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