GETTYSBURG.

Putaruru Press, 19 January 1928, Page 8

GETTYSBURG.

FAMOUS TWO-MINUTE SPEECH. Rang Round the World. Gettysburg is famous for a battle and a speech. The battle was fought in America’s Civil War, and the speech was made by Abraham Lincoln.

A heroine of Gettysburg has just died. The famous battle took place in the summer of 1863. On one side were the Southern forces, on the other side were Abraham Lincoln’s Northern forces, with his great dream of ending slavery and making the States into one united free and peaceful commonwealth. Mrs. McLennan, who was then Miss Wade, believed that Lincoln was right, and she sat on the platform when he made his "Gettysburg speech. During the battle she and her sister Jennie went out to the field to assist the wounded, bringing them food and water, and helping to carry them to the Court House, which soon became a sort of hospital. The girls went to and fro without any thought of danger, and Jennie was killed by a fragment of shell. Her sister continued to carry water to the wounded not-

withstanding. t Lincoln’s Speech. T> She lived to see the war well won, ■_ and to hear the famous words of Linn coin’s Two-Minute Speech ring round d the world: — r “ Fourscore and seven years ago [t our fathers brought forth on this s continent a new nation, conceived in f liberty and dedicated to the proposih tion that all men are created equal. ,1 Now we are engaged in a great civil _ war testing whether that nation, or _ any nation so conceived and so dedi- ■ rated, can long endure. e “We are men on a great battle- , field of that war. We have come to _ dedicate a portion of that field 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; 2 but, in a larger sense, we cannot de--1 dicate, we cannot corsecrate, we canc not hallow this ground. The brave 3 men, living and dead, who struggle , here, have consecrated it far above . our power to add or detract. “ The world will little note nor long ' remember what we ,-oy here, but j! . can never forget what they did here. , It is for us, the living, rather to be i dedicated here to the unfinished work - which they who fought here have thus ’ far so nobly advanced. i > “ It is rather for us to be here dedi- 1 l cated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honoured dead we take increased de- : vo tion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that 1 ' 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.” Her Only Memory. Sixty years and more went by, and then Mrs. McLennan lay dying, an j old lady of 86. Strange to say, she seemed to forget everything in her j long lifetime except Gettysburg. She did not recognise her children, and kept begging the nurse to leave her and attend to a young soldier whom j she imagined to be dying in the next J room. What was it that took her | back i.o those scenes of her girlhood ? i Perhaps her sister was nearer to her j than anyone guessed.