The Sandburg Treasury by Carl Sandburg

Author:Carl Sandburg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

I was seven and a half years old when General Ulysses S. Grant died and I went to his funeral. He had died far from Galesburg, I didn’t hear where. But Main Street stores closed for the afternoon and the Q. shops and the Brown Cornplanter Works and Frost’s foundry shut down too. A parade began at the Q. depot on Seminary Street and moved to Main Street, turned west, and marched to the Public Square. They said it was the longest parade Galesburg had ever seen.

The five long blocks of Main Street sidewalks from Seminary to the Square were crowded with people. It was a hot July afternoon in 1885. My father had been pushed and squeezed and had done some pushing and squeezing himself till at last we stood about three or four feet from the curb in front of the big O. T. Johnson dry-goods store. It was good they had made me put on shoes and stockings, because the way I got tramped on would have been worse if I had been barefoot. I tried to see the parade looking between the legs of men ahead of me but all I saw was more legs of more men. I pulled my father’s hand and blubbered, “I can’t see! I can’t see!”

My father lifted me up, stuck his head between my legs, and there I sat straddle of him, and only a giant could see the parade better than I could. There was the marshal at the head of the parade on a skittish sorrel horse with a shiny bridle and with brass buttons, each bigger than a silver dollar, on the saddle. Then came two rows of policemen with nickel-plated stars shining on their blue coats, each with a club hanging from his belt. A fife-and-drum corps followed. The pounding noise they made seemed to shake the buildings and I took a better grip on my father’s hat to make sure I wouldn’t fall off. Then came a long line of men dressed like they might be going to church on Sunday, marching four in a row.

The Galesburg Marine Band marched past, men walking and blowing into their horns. One man had a big horn that seemed to be wrapped around him and I was puzzled how he got into it. They had on blue coats and blue pants with a stripe down the sides. Their music was slow and sad. It was only twenty years since the war had ended and General Grant was the greatest general in the war and they wanted to show they were sad because he was dead.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.