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
crumbling bones. O, American Nation, with your wonderful
civilization of today, it is well to pause here amid the "steam
shriek" career of your harried life with all its getting and
spending, to contemplate the ruin of even this once consecrated
piece of ground.
Here as you watch, the swift winged swallows dart from their
homes in the steep bank of the stream; the kingfisher sounds his
discordant rattle and hangs poised in mid air as he gazes into
the waters below; the woodbine like a staunch friend still
clings round the oak or hangs out its crimson banner in autumn;
the meadowlark walks sedately on the vast coils of the serpent
calling, "Spring o' the year," or as we fancied, "they are not
here," as he did on that first morning.
