nd from the huge
body, were too much for the American crowd's sense of humor, always
stronger than its sense of reverence. A suppressed yet unmistakable
titter caught the throng, ran through it, and was gone. Yet no one
who knew the President's face could doubt that he had heard it and
had understood. Calmly enough, after a pause almost too slight to be
recognized, he went on, and in a dozen words his tones had gathered
volume, he had come to his power and dignity. There was no smile now
on any face of those who listened. People stopped breathing rather,
as if they feared to miss an inflection. A loose-hung figure, six
feet four inches high, he towered above them, conscious of and
quietly ignoring the bad first impression, unconscious of a charm of
personality which reversed that impression within a sentence. That
these were his people was his only thought. He had something to say to
them; what did it matter about him or his voice?

"Fourscore and seven years ago," spoke the President, "our fathers
brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and
dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we
are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any
nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on
a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of
it as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that
that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we
should do this.

"But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate,
we cannot hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who
struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or
to detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say
here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the
living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they
who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us
to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from
these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which
they here gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly
resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation,
under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of
the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the
earth."

There was no sound from the silen