as the very one that escaped the serpent and leaped into the
creek centuries ago, we left the place to the spirits of that
unknown age and the moonlight.

But why this concern over a vanished race? Why all this worry
over the Coliseum or Parthenon? Why so eager to learn of these
crumbling mounds and broken down embankments in our own land?
Then as if we heard a voice from the shadowy past, rising from
these silent ruins, we begin to gain their secret at last. The
Parthenon and Coliseum call up the sad story with its yet sadder
truth that true weal can only come to that nation that plans for
the future. Yet each adds something to the onward march of
civilization.

In the ancient gardens of France and Italy the nightingale still
warbles her divine hymn, all unmindful of Caesar's conquests.
The whippoorwill calls in her plaintive notes through the
silvery spring nights over the graves of this vanished race of
America. Let us concern ourselves about the past only as that
past shall contribute to a more glorious future. It is not
mounds, pyramids, or bronze tablets we should be building for
later generations of archaeologists to puzzle their brains over.

A large and beautiful mound standing in the precincts of the
original plat of Columbus, Ohio, was demolished, the clay taken
therefrom and used as the material for the bricks with which the
first State House was built. Here where a thousand years came
and went and the Indian warrior reverently spared the last
resting place of these unrecorded dead, another people reared
their legislative halls out of their mouldering sepulchres and