Light of legend and story,
Flower of marble and verse.

The impulse which led us to set apart a day for decorating the graves of
our soldiers sprung from the grieved heart of the nation, and in our
own time there is little chance of the rite being neglected. But the
generations that come after us should not allow the observance to fall
into disuse. What with us is an expression of fresh love and sorrow,
should be with them an acknowledgment of an incalculable debt.

Decoration Day is the most beautiful of our national holidays. How
different from those sullen batteries which used to go rumbling through
our streets are the crowds of light carriages, laden with flowers and
greenery, wending their way to the neighboring cemeteries! The grim
cannon have turned into palm branches, and the shell and shrapnel into
peach blooms. There is no hint of war in these gay baggage trains,
except the presence of men in undress uniform, and perhaps here and
there an empty sleeve to remind one of what has been. Year by year that
empty sleeve is less in evidence.

The observance of Decoration Day is unmarked by that disorder and
confusion common enough with our people in their holiday moods. The
earlier sorrow has faded out of the hour, leaving a softened solemnity.
It quickly ceased to be simply a local commemoration. While the
sequestered country churchyards and burial-places near our great northern
cities were being hung with May garlands, the thought could not but come
to us that there were graves lying southward above which bent a grief as
tender and sacred as our own. Invisibly we dropped unseen flowers upon
those mounds. There is a beautiful significance in the fact that, two
years after the close of the war, the women of Columbus, Mississippi,