at them now with their bare walls and broken windows
and tumbled down appearance generally, he often wonders
how he came to build them. Some times, more especially
at Christmas time, he gets on an old, and now uncertain
steed called Memory, and rides back to all the castles
he has lived in. So beautiful when he built them,
so brightly painted by Hope and Pride and Ambition
and all the other celebrated artists of that day;
now so dingy and wrecked that you would hardly know
them, and some clear faded out of sight. The
castle, little one, that you are now living in has
over the front door in big letters Christmas,
and from its window you see such lots of fun that you
will never have, such lots of presents that you will
never get, and such a lot of imagining that you will
never see realized. After this week is over,
you will take down the big sign over the door, close
the blinds, and stand watching with grieved heart
while your castle fades into the air. There is
nothing on earth, as you will see when you are old,
that is not something like these castles in Spain,
and but One Thing, that is not tainted with their
evanescent life. God grant, little one, that
at the end of our lives, you and I may have clung to
that one thing, and that we may have so lived that
the many mansions of our Father in a fairer world
may not be for us—castles in Spain.
Finis.
FOR A SOLDIER
(Henry C. Tinsley, Died August 21, 1902)
Not ’mid the din of
battle long ago,
But in the lingering
clutch of later pain
Death found him,
whom we shall not see again
Lifting a fearless front to
every foe.
Yet shall suns somewhere shine
for him, and blow
The lilies and
the roses without stain,
Who through the
lengthened years in heart and brain
Knew most of storm and winter
with its snow.
For it is written in the starry
sky,—
In the vast spaces and the silences,—
That God’s eternal universe is his
Who fears not, though he live or if he die.
—A soldier to the dauntless end was
he,
As riding with his red artillery.
ArmisteadC. Gordon.
