and then
a hard fall, and a rustle of papers, and a scramble, and then some words
of objurgation at the sudden overthrow.

There was no portable light that I could take to his assistance. Beside
that, I was as much upset with cruel laughter as the reporter had been
by the pump handle. In this state of helplessness I shut the door. But
the next morning newspaper proved how utter had been the discomfiture
and demoralisation of my journalistic friend. He put my sermon under the
name of ex-Governor Pollock at the meeting of the Christian Commission,
and he made my discourse begin with the words, "When I was Governor of
Pennsylvania."

Never since John Gutenberg invented the art of printing was there such a
riot of types or such mixing up of occasions. Philadelphia went into a
brown study as to what it all meant, and the more the people read of
ex-Governor Pollock's speech and of my sermon of the night before, the
more they were stunned by the stroke of that pump handle.

But it was soon forgotten--everything is. The memory of man is poor. All
the talk about the country never forgetting those who fought for it is
an untruth. It does forget. Picture how veterans of the war sometimes
had to turn the hand-organs on the streets of Philadelphia to get a
living for their families! How ruthlessly many of them have been turned
out of office that some bloat of a politician might take their place!
The fact is, there is not a man or woman under thirty years of age, who,
born before the war, has any full appreciation of the four years
martyrdom of 1861 to 1865, inclusive. I can scarcely remember, and yet I
still feel the pressure of domestic calamity that overshadowed the
nation then.

Since things have been hardened, as was the guardsman in the Crimean War
who heartlessly wrote home to his mother: "I do not want to see any more
crying letters come to the Crimea from you. Those I have received I have
put into my rifle, after loading it, and have fired them at the
Russians, because you appear to have a strong dislike of them. If you
had seen as many killed as I have you would not have as many weak ideas
as you now have."

After the War came a period of great national rejoicing. I shall never
forget, in the summer of 1869, a great national peace jubilee was held
in Boston, and DeWitt Moore, an elder of my church, had been honoured by
the selection of some of his music to be rendered on that occasion. I
accompanied him to the jubile