COOLNESS AND HEROISM OF THOSE LEFT TO PERISH--SUICIDE OF
MURDOCK--CAPTAIN SMITH'S END--THE SHIP'S BAND PLAYS A NOBLE HYMN AS THE
VESSEL GOES DOWN
THE general feeling aboard the ship after the boats had left her
sides was that she would not survive her wound, but the passengers who
remained aboard displayed the utmost heroism.
William T. Stead, the famous English journalist, was so litt{l}e alarmed
that he calmly discussed with one of the passengers the probable height
of the iceberg after the Titanic had shot into it.
Confidence in the ability of the Titanic to remain afloat doubtlessly
led many of the passengers to death. The theory that the great ship was
unsinkable remained with hundreds who had entrusted themselves to the
gigantic hulk, long after the officers knew that the vessel could not
survive.
The captain and officers behaved with superb gallantry, and there was
perfect order and discipline among those who were aboard, even after all
hope had been abandoned for the salvation of the ship.
Many women went down, steerage women who were unable to get to the upper
decks where the boats were launched, maids who were overlooked in the
confusion, cabin passengers who refused to desert their husbands or who
reached the decks after the last of the life-boats was gone and the ship
was settling for her final plunge to the bottom of the Atlantic.
Narratives of survivors do not bear out the supposition that the final
hours upon the vessel's decks were passed in darkness. They say the
electric lighting plant held out until the last, and that even as they
watched the ship sink, from their places in the floating life-boats, her
lights were gleaming in long rows as she plunged under by the head. Just
before she sank, some of the refugees say, the ship broke in two abaft
the engine room after the bulkhead explosions had occurred.
COLONEL ASTOR'S DEATH
To Colonel Astor's death Philip Mock bears this testimony.
"Many men were hanging on to rafts in the sea. William T. Stead and
Colonel Astor were among them. Their feet and hands froze and they had
to let go. Both were drowned."
The last man among the survivors to speak to Colonel Astor was K.
Whiteman, the ship's barber.
"I shaved Colonel Astor Sunday afternoon," said Whiteman. "He was a
pleasant, affable man, and that awful night when I found myself standing
beside him on the passenger deck, helping to put the women into the
boats, I spoke to him.
"'Where is your life-belt?' I asked him.
"'I didn't think there would be any need of it,' he said.
"'Get one while there is time,' I told him. 'The last boat is gone, and
we are done for.'
"'No,' he said, 'I think there are some life-boats to be launched, and
we may get on one of them.'
"'There are no life-rafts,' I told him, 'and the ship is going to sink.
I am going to jump overboard and take a chance on swimming out and being
picked up by one of the boats. Better come along.'
"'No, thank you,' he said, calmly, 'I think I'll have to stick.'
"I asked him if he would mind shaking hands with me. He said, 'With
pleasure,' gave me a hearty grip, and then I climbed up on the rail and
jumped overboard. I was in the water nearly four hours before one of the
boats picked me up."
CAPTAIN WASHED OVERBOARD
Murdock's last orders were to Quartermaster Moody and a few other petty
officers who had taken their places in the rigid discipline of the ship
and were lowering the boats. Captain Smith came up to him on the bridge
several times and then rushed down again. They spoke to one another only
in monosyllables.
There were stories that Captain Smith, when he saw the ship actually
going down, had committed suicide. There is no basis for such tales. The
captain, according to the testimony of those who were near him almost
until the last, was admirably cool. He carried a revolver in his hand,
ready to use it on anyone who disobeyed orders.
"I want every man to act like a man for manhood's sake," he said, "and
if they don't, a bullet awaits the coward."
With the revolver in his hand--a fact that undoubtedly gave rise to
the suicide theory--the captain moved up and down the deck. He gave the
order for each life-boat to make off and he remained until every boat
was gone. Standing on the bridge he finally called out the order: "Each
man save himself." At that moment all discipline fled. It was the last
call of death. If there had been any hope among those on board before,
the hope now had fled.
The bearded admiral of the White Star Line fleet, with every life-saving
device launched from the decks, was returning to the deck to perform the
sacred office of going down with his ship when a wave dashed over the
side and tore him from the ladder.
The Titanic was sinking rapidly by the head, with the twisting sidelong
motion that was soon to aim her on her course two miles down. Murdock
saw the skipper swept out; but did not move. Captain Smith was but one
of a multitude of lost at that moment. Murdock may have known that the
last desperate thought of the gray mariner was to get upon his bridge
and die in command. That the old man could not have done this may have
had something to do with Murdock's suicidal inspiration. Of that no man
may say or safely guess.
The wave that swept the skipper out bore him almost to the thwart of
a crowded life-boat. Hands reached out, but he wrenched himself away,
turned and swam back toward the ship.
Some say that he said, "Good-bye, I'm going back to the ship."
He disappeared for a moment, then reappeared where a rail was slipping
under water. Cool and courageous to the end, loyal to his duty under the
most difficult circumstances, he showed himself a noble captain, and he
died a noble death.
SAW BOTH OFFICERS PERISH
Quartermaster Moody saw all this, watched the skipper scramble aboard
again onto the submerged decks, and then vanish altogether in a great
billow.
As Moody's eye lost sight of the skipper in this confusion of waters it
again shifted to the bridge, and just in time to see Murdock take his
life. The man's face was turned toward him, Moody said, and he could
not mistake it. There were still many gleaming lights on the ship,
flickering out like little groups of vanishing stars, and with the
clear starshine on the waters there was nothing to cloud or break the
quartermaster's vision.
"I saw Murdock die by his own hand," said Moody, "saw the flash from
his gun, heard the crack that followed the flash and then saw him plunge
over on his face."
Others report hearing several pistol shots on the decks below the
bridge, but amid the groans and shrieks and cries, shouted orders and
all that vast orchestra of sounds that broke upon the air they must have
been faint periods of punctuation
BAND PLAYED ITS OWN DIRGE
The band had broken out in the strains of "Nearer, My God, to Thee,"
some minutes before Murdock lifted the revolver to his head, fired and
toppled over on his face. Moody saw all this in a vision that filled his
brain, while his ears drank in the tragic strain of the beautiful hymn
that the band played as their own dirge, even to the moment when the
waters sucked them down.
Wherever Murdock's eye swept the water in that instant, before he drew
his revolver, it looked upon veritable seas of drowning men and women.
From the decks there came to him the shrieks and groans of the caged and
drowning, for whom all hope of escape was utterly vanished. He evidently
never gave a thought to the possibility of saving himself, his mind
freezing with the horrors he beheld and having room for just one central
idea--swift extinction.
The strains of the hymn and the frantic cries of the dying blended in a
symphony of sorrow.
Led by the green light, under the light of stars, the boats drew away,
and the bow, then the quarter, then the stacks and last the stern of the
marvel ship of a few days before passed beneath the waters. The great
force of the ship's sinking was unaided by any violence of the elements,
and the suction, not so great as had been feared, rocked but mildly the
group of boats now a quarter of a mile distant from it.
Just before the Titanic disappeared from view men and women leaped from
the stern. More than a hundred men, according to Colonel Gracie, jumped
at the last. Gracie was among the number and he and the second officer
were of the very few who were saved.
As the vessel disappeared, the waves drowned the majestic
{illust. caption = DEPTH OF OCEAN WHERE THE TITANIC WENT DOWN
The above etching shows a diagram of the ocean depths between the shore
of Newfoundland (shown at the top to the left, by the heavily shaded
part) to 800 miles out, where the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank.
Over the Great Bank of Newfoundland the greatest depth is about 35
fathoms, or 210 feet. Then there is a sudden drop to 105 fathoms, or
630 feet, and then there is a falling away to 1650 fathoms or 9900 feet,
then 2000 fathoms or 12,000 feet, and about where the Titanic sank 2760
fathoms or 16,560 feet.}
hymn which the musicians played as they went to their watery grave. The
most authentic accounts agree that this hymn was not "Nearer, My God, to
Thee," which it seems had been
{illust. caption = CARPATHIA
The Cunard liner which brought the survivors of the Titanic to New
York.}
{illust. caption = THE HERO WIRELESS OPERATOR OF THE TITANIC
Photograph of Harold...}
played shortly before, but "Autumn," which is found in the Episcopal
hymnal and which fits appropriately the situation on the Titanic in the
last moments of pain and darkness there. One line, "Hold me up in mighty
waters," particularly may have suggested the hymn to some minister
aboard the doomed vessel, who, it has been thought, thereupon asked
the remaining passengers to join in singing the hymn, in a last service
aboard the sinking ship, soon to be ended by death itself.
Following is the hymn:
God of mercy and compassion!
Look with pity on my pain:
Hear a mournful, broken spirit
Prostrate at Thy feet complain;
Many are my foes, and mighty;
Strength to conquer I have none;
Nothing can uphold my goings
But Thy blessed Self alone.
Saviour, look on Thy beloved;
Triumph over all my foes;
Turn to heavenly joy my mourning,
Turn to gladness all my woes;
Live or die, or work or suffer,
Let my weary soul abide,
In all changes whatsoever
Sure and steadfast by Thy side.
When temptations fierce assault me,
When my enemies I find,
Sin and guilt, and death and Satan,
All against my soul combined,
Hold me up in mighty waters,
Keep my eyes on things above,
Righteousness, divine Atonement,
Peace, and everlasting Love.
It was a little lame schoolmaster, Tyrtaeus, who aroused the Spartans by
his poetry and led them to victory against the foe.
It was the musicians of the band of the Titanic--poor men, paid a few
dollars a week--who played the music to keep up the courage of the souls
aboard the sinking ship.
"The way the band kept playing was a noble thing," says the wireless
operator. "I heard it first while we were working the wireless, when
there was a rag-time tune for us, and the last I saw of the band, when I
was floating, struggling in the icy water, it was still on deck, playing
'Autumn.' How those brave fellows ever did it I cannot imagine."
Perhaps that music, made in the face of death, would not have satisfied
the exacting critical sense. It may be that the chilled fingers faltered
on the pistons of the cornet or at the valves of the French horn, that
the time was irregular and that by an organ in a church, with a decorous
congregation, the hymns they chose would have been better played and
sung. But surely that music went up to God from the souls of drowning
men, and was not less acceptable than the song of songs no mortal ear
may hear, the harps of the seraphs and the choiring cherubim. Under the
sea the music-makers lie, still in their fingers clutching the broken
and battered means of melody; but over the strident voice of warring
winds and the sound of many waters there rises their chant eternally;
and though the musicians lie hushed and cold at the sea's heart, their
music is heard forevermore.
LAST MOMENTS
That great ship, which started out as proudly, went down to her death
like some grime silent juggernaut, drunk with carnage and anxious to
stop the throbbing of her own heart at the bottom of the sea. Charles H.
Lightoller, second officer of the Titanic, tells the story this way:
"I stuck to the ship until the water came up to my ankles. There had
been no lamentations, no demonstrations either from the men passengers
as they saw the last life-boat go, and there was no wailing or crying,
no outburst from the men who lined the ship's rail as the Titanic
disappeared from sight.
"The men stood quietly as if they were in church. They knew that they
were in the sight of God; that in a moment judgment would be passed
upon them. Finally, the ship took a dive, reeling for a moment, then
plunging. I was sucked to the side of the ship against the grating over
the blower for the exhaust. There was an explosion. It blew me to the
surface again, only to be sucked back again by the water rushing into
the ship
"This time I landed against the grating over the pipes, which furnish a
draught for the funnels, and stuck there. There was another explosion,
and I came to the surface. The ship seemed to be heaving tremendous
sighs as she went down. I found myself not many feet from the ship, but
on the other side of it. The ship had turned around while I was under
the water.
"I came up near a collapsible life-boat and grabbed it. Many men were
in the water near me. They had jumped at the last minute. A funnel fell
within four inches of me and killed one of the swimmers. Thirty clung to
the capsized boat, and a life-boat, with forty survivors in it already,
finally took them off.
"George D. Widener and Harry Elkins Widener were among those who jumped
at the last minute. So did Robert Williams Daniel. The three of them
went down together. Daniel struck out, lashing the water with his arms
until he had made a point far distant from the sinking monster of the
sea. Later he was picked up by one of the passing life-boats.
"The Wideners were not seen again, nor was John B. Thayer, who went down
on the boat. 'Jack' Thayer, who was literally thrown off the Titanic
by an explosion, after he had refused to leave the men to go with his
mother, floated around on a raft for an hour before he was picked up."
AFLOAT WITH JACK THAYER
Graphic accounts of the final plunge of the Titanic were related by two
Englishmen, survivors by the merest chance. One of them struggled for
hours to hold himself afloat on an overturned collapsible life-boat,
to one end of which John B. Thayer, Jr., of Philadelphia, whose father
perished, hung until rescued.
The men gave their names as A. H. Barkworth, justice of the peace of
East Riding, Yorkshire, England, and W. J. Mellers, of Christ Church
Terrace, Chelsea, London. The latter, a young man, had started for this
country with his savings to seek his fortune, and lost all but his life.
Mellers, like Quartermaster Moody, said Captain Smith did not commit
suicide. The captain jumped from the bridge, Mellers declares, and he
heard him say to his officers and crew: "You have done your duty, boys.
Now every man for himself." Mellers and Barkworth, who say their names
have been spelled incorrectly in most of the lists of survivors, both
declare there were three distinct explosions before the Titanic broke in
two, and bow section first, and stern part last, settled with her human
cargo into the sea.
Her four whistles kept up a deafening blast until the explosions,
declare the men. The death cries from the shrill throats of the
blatant steam screechers beside the smokestacks so rent the air that
conversation among the passengers was possible only when one yelled into
the ear of a fellow-unfortunate.
"I did not know the Thayer family well," declared Mr. Barkworth, "but I
had met young Thayer, a clear-cut chap, and his father on the trip. The
lad and I struggled in the water for several hours endeavoring to hold
afloat by grabbing to the sides and end of an overturned life-boat.
Now and again we lost our grip and fell back into the water. I did not
recognize young Thayer in the darkness, as we struggled for our lives,
but I did recall having met him before when we were picked up by a
life-boat. We were saved by the merest chance, because the survivors on
a life-boat that rescued us hesitated in doing so, it seemed, fearing
perhaps that additional burdens would swamp the frail craft.
"I considered my fur overcoat helped to keep me afloat. I had a life
preserver over it, under my arms, but it would not have held me up so
well out of the water but for the coat. The fur of the coat seemed not
to get wet through, and retained a certain amount of air that added to
buoyance. I shall never part with it.
"The testimony of J. Bruce Ismay, managing director of the White Star
Line, that he had not heard explosions before the Titanic settled,
indicates that he must have gotten some distance from her in his
life-boat. There were three distinct explosions and the ship broke in
the center. The bow settled headlong first, and the stern last. I was
looking toward her from the raft to which young Thayer and I had clung."
HOW CAPTAIN SMITH DIED
Barkworth jumped, just before the Titanic went down. He said there were
enough life-preservers for all the passengers, but in the confusion many
may not have known where to look for them. Mellers, who had donned a
life-preserver, was hurled into the air, from the bow of the ship by the
force of the explosion, which he believed caused the Titanic to part in
the center.
"I was not far from where Captain Smith stood on the bridge, giving full
orders to his men," said Mellers. "The brave old seaman was crying, but
he had stuck heroically to the last. He did not shoot himself. He
jumped from the bridge when he had done all he could. I heard his final
instructions to his crew, and recall that his last words were: 'You have
done your duty, boys. Now every man for himself.'
"I thought I was doomed to go down with the rest. I stood on the deck,
awaiting my fate, fearing to jump from the ship. Then came a grinding
noise, followed by two others, and I was hurled into the deep. Great
waves engulfed me, but I was not drawn toward the ship, so that I
believe there was little suction. I swam about for more than one hour
before I was picked up by a boat."
A FAITHFUL OFFICER
Charles Herbert Lightoller, previously mentioned, stood by the ship
until the last, working to get the passengers away, and when it appeared
that he had made his last trip he went up high on the officers' quarters
and made the best dive he knew how to make just as the ship plunged down
to the depths. This is an excerpt from his testimony before the Senate
investigating committee:
"What time did you leave the ship?"
"I didn't leave it."
"Did it leave you?"
"Yes, sir."
Children shall hear that episode sung in after years and his own
descendants shall recite it to their bairns. Mr. Lightoller acted as an
officer and gentleman should, and he was not the only one.
A MESSAGE FROM A NOTORIOUS GAMBLER
That Jay Yates, gambler, confidence man and fugitive from justice, known
to the police and in sporting circles as J. H. Rogers, went down with
the Titanic after assisting many women aboard life-boats, became known
when a note, written on a blank page torn from a diary: was delivered to
his sister. Here is a fac-simile of the note:
{illust.}
This note was given by Rogers to a woman he was helping into a
life-boat. The woman, who signed herself "Survivor," inclosed the note
with the following letter.
"You will find note that was handed to me as I was leaving the Titanic.
Am stranger to this man, but think he was a card player. He helped me
aboard a life-boat and I saw him help others. Before we were lowered I
saw him jump into the sea. If picked up I did not recognize him on the
Carpathia. I don't think he was registered on the ship under his right
name."
Rogers' mother, Mrs. Mary A. Yates, an old woman, broke down when she
learned son had perished.
"Thank God I know where he is now," she sobbed. "I have not heard from
him for two years. The last news I had from him he was in London."
FIFTY LADS MET DEATH
Among the many hundreds of heroic souls who went bravely and quietly to
their end were fifty happy-go-lucky youngsters shipped as bell boys
or messengers to serve the first cabin passengers. James Humphreys, a
quartermaster, who commanded life-boat No. 11, told a li{t}tle story
that shows how these fifty lads met death.
Humphreys said the boys were called to their regular posts in the main
cabin entry and taken in charge by their captain, a steward. They were
ordered to remain in the cabin and not get in the way. Throughout the
first hour of confusion and terror these lads sat quietly on their
benches in various parts of the first cabin.
Then, just toward the end when the order was passed around that the ship
was going down and every man was free to save himself, if he kept away
from the life-boats in which the women
{illust. caption = "WHO HATH MEASURED THE WATERS IN THE HOLLOW OF
HIS HAND."--Isaiah XL:xii}
were being taken, the bell boys scattered to all parts of the ship.
Humphreys said he saw numbers of them smoking cigarettes and joking with
the passengers. They seemed to think that their violation of the rule
against smoking while on duty was a sufficient breach of discipline.
Not one of them attempted to enter a life-boat. Not one of them was
saved.
THE HEROES WHO REMAINED
The women who left the ship; the men who remained--there is little to
choose between them for heroism. Many of the women compelled to take to
the boats would have stayed, had it been possible, to share the fate of
their nearest and dearest, without whom their lives are crippled, broken
and disconsolate.
The heroes who remained would have said, with Grenville. "We have only
done our duty, as a man is bound to do." They sought no palms or crowns
of martyrdom. "They also serve who only stand and wait," and their first
action was merely to step aside and give places in the boats to women
and children, some of whom were too young to comprehend or to remember.
There was no debate as to whether the life of a financier, a master
of business, was rated higher in the scale of values than that of an
ignorant peasant mother. A woman was a woman, whether she wore rags
or pearls. A life was given for a life, with no assertion that one was
priceless and the other comparatively valueless.
Many of those who elected to remain might have escaped. "Chivalry" is a
mild appellation for their conduct. Some of the vaunted knights of old
were desperate cowards by comparison. A fight in the open field, or
jousting in the tournament, did not call out the manhood in a man as did
the waiting till the great ship took the final plunge, in the knowledge
that the seas round about were covered with loving and yearning
witnesses whose own salvation was not assured.
When the roll is called hereafter of those who are "purged of pride
because they died, who know the worth of their days," let the names of
the men who went down with the Titanic be found written there in the
sight of God and men.
THE OBVIOUS LESSON
And, whatever view of the accident be taken, whether the moralist shall
use it to point the text of a solemn or denunciatory warning, or whether
the materialist, swinging to the other extreme, scouts any other theory
than that of the "fortuitous concurrence of atoms," there is scarcely a
thinking mortal who has heard of what happened who has not been deeply
stirred, in the sense of a personal bereavement, to a profound humility
and the conviction of his own insignificance in the greater universal
scheme.
Many there are whom the influences of religion do not move, and upon
whose hearts most generous sentiments knock in vain, who still are
overawed and bowed by the magnitude of this catastrophe. No matter what
they believe about it, the effect is the same. The effect is to reduce
a man from the swaggering braggart--the vainglorious lord of what he
sees--the self-made master of fate, of nature, of time, of space, of
everything--to his true microscopic stature in the cosmos. He goes in
tears to put together again the fragments of the few, small, pitiful
things that belonged to him.
"Though Love may pine, and Reason chafe,
There came a Voice without reply."
The only comfort, all that can bring surcease of sorrow, is that men
fashioned in the image of their Maker rose to the emergency like heroes,
and went to their grave as bravely as any who have given their lives
at any time in war. The hearts of those who waited on the land, and
agonized, and were impotent to save, have been laid upon the same altars
of sacrifice. The mourning of those who will not be comforted rises from
alien lands together with our own in a common broken intercession. How
little is the 882 feet of the "monster" that we launched compared with
the arc of the rainbow we can see even in our grief spanning the frozen
boreal mist!
"The best of what we do and are,
Just God, forgive!"
THE ANCIENT SACRIFICE
And still our work must go on. It is the business of men and women
neither to give way to unavailing grief nor to yield to the crushing
incubus of despair, but to find hope that is at the bottom of
everything, even at the bottom of the sea where that glorious virgin of
the ocean is dying. "And when she took unto herself a mate
She must espouse the everlasting sea."
Even so, for any progress of the race, there must be the ancient
sacrifice of man's own stubborn heart, and all his pride. He must
forever "lay in dust life's glory dead." He cannot rise to the height it
was intended he should reach till he has plumbed the depths, till he has
devoured the bread of the bitterest affliction, till he has known the
ache of hopes deferred, of anxious expectation disappointed, of dreams
that are not to be fulfilled this side of the river that waters the
meads of Paradise. There still must be a reason why it is not an unhappy
thing to be taken from "the world we know to one a wonder still," and so
that we go bravely, what does it matter, the mode of our going? It was
not only those who stood back, who let the women and children go to
the boats, that died. There died among us on the shore something of the
fierce greed of bitterness, something of the sharp hatred of passion,
something of the mad lust of revenge and of knife-edge competition.
Though we are not aware of it, perhaps, we are not quite the people that
we were before out of the mystery an awful hand was laid upon us all,
and what we had thought the colossal power of wealth was in a twinkling
shown to be no more than the strength of an infant's little finger, or
the twining tendril of a plant.
"Lest we forget; lest we forget!"
{"illustration", really "music" Lyrics =
God of mercy and compassion, Look with pity on my pain; Hear a mournful,
broken spirit Prostrate at Thy feet complain; Many are my foes and
mighty; Strength to conquer I have none; Nothing can uphold my goings
But they blessed Self alone. AMEN
{2nd Stanza} Saviour, look on Thy beloved, Triumph over all my foes,
Turn to heavenly joy my mourning, Turn to gladness all my woes; Live
or die, or work or suffer Let my weary soul abide, In all changes
whatsoever, Sure and steadfast by Thy side:
{3rd Stanza} When temptations fierce assault me, When my enemies I find,
Sin and guilt, and death and Satan, All against my soul combined, Hold
me up in mighty waters, Keep my eyes on things above--Rightousness,{sic}
divine atonement Peace and everlasting love,}
{illust. caption = LATITUDE 41.46 NORTH, LONGITUDE 50.14 WEST WHERE
MANHOOD PERISHED NOT}
{illust. caption = LOWERING OF THE LIFE-BOATS FROM THE TITANIC
It is easy to understand why...}
{illust. caption = PASSENGERS LEAVING THE TITANIC IN THE LIFE-BOATS
The agony and despair which possessed the occupants of these boats
as they were carried away from the doomed giant, leaving husbands and
brothers behind, is almost beyond description. It is little wonder that
the strain of these moments, with the physical and mental suffering
which followed during the early morning hours, left many of the women
still hysterical when they reached New York.}
WHERE MANHOOD PERISHED NOT
Where cross the lines of forty north
And fifty-fourteen west
There rolls a wild and greedy sea
With death upon its crest.
No stone or wreath from human hands
Will ever mark the spot
Where fifteen hundred men went down,
But Manhood perished not.
Old Ocean takes but little heed
Of human tears or woe.
No shafts adorn the ocean graves,
Nor weeping willows grow.
Nor is there need of marble slab
To keep in mind the spot
Where noble men went down to death,
But manhood perished not!
Those men who looked on death and smiled,
And trod the crumbling deck,
Have saved much more than precious lives
From out that awful wreck.
Though countless joys and hopes and fears
Were shattered at a breath,
'Tis something that the name of Man
Did not go down to death.
'Tis not an easy thing to die,
E'en in the open air,
Twelve hundred miles from home and friends,
In a shroud of black despair.
A wreath to crown the brow of man,
And hide a former blot
Will ever blossom o'er the waves
Where Manhood perished not.
HARVEY P. THEW
{spelling uncertain due to poor printing}