perfect lines, reports his hand had written when
he was its most assiduous member. Others might
have forgotten him; Linonia had not.

On its one-hundredth anniversary, July 27,
1853,--Commencement Week,--the poet of the
occasion was Francis Miles Finch, Yale, 1846,
later Judge of the New York Court of Appeals.
As poet, Mr. Finch of course recalled many former
members of the society. He ended with a poem
on Nathan Hale in which he held his listeners
spellbound as stanza after stanza, magnetic in
proportion to their truthful beauty, fell from his
lips.

There has been a further service to his country
by Judge Finch. His own character has been
graven into two different poems,--the one just
referred to, and one that he wrote later. The
latter poem had, undoubtedly, a powerful influence
in causing our national Decoration Day to be
celebrated throughout the United States.

The story of this poem is interesting. In a town
in Mississippi certain Southern women went on a
spring day, soon after the close of the Civil War,
to cover with flowers the graves of their beloved
dead. The gracious and tender thought must have
come to them that in the graves of aliens buried
among them lay those as deeply mourned in North-

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