twenty years at hull house

carried by the Eighth Wisconsin Regiment through the entire war, and

now dwelt an honored pensioner in the state building itself.

Many times, standing in the north end of our orchard, which was

only twelve miles from that mysterious line which divided Illinois from

Wisconsin, we anxiously scanned the deep sky, hoping to see Old Abe

fly southward right over our apple trees, for it was clearly possible that

he might at any moment escape from his keeper, who, although he

had been a soldier and a sentinel, would have to sleep sometimes. We

gazed with thrilled interest at one speck after another in the flawless

sky, but although Old Abe never came to see us, a much more incredible thing happened, for we were at last taken to see him.

We started one golden summer's day, two happy children in the

family carriage, with my father and mother and an older sister to

whom, because she was just home from boarding school, we confidently appealed whenever we needed information. We were driven

northward hour after hour, past harvest fields in which the stubble

glinted from bronze to gold and the heavy-headed grain rested luxuriously in rounded shocks, until we reached that beautiful region of

hills and lakes which surrounds the capital city of Wisconsin.

But although Old Abe, sitting sedately upon his high perch, was sufficiently like an uplifted ensign to remind us of a Roman eagle, and

although his veteran keeper, clad in an old army coat, was ready to

answer all our questions and to tell us of the thirty-six battles and skirmishes through which Old Abe had passed unscathed, the crowning

moment of the impressive journey came to me later, illustrating once

more that children are as quick to catch the meaning of a symbol as they are unaccountably slow to understand the real world about them.

The entire journey to the veteran war eagle had itself symbolized

that search for the heroic and perfect which so persistently haunts the

young; and as I stood under the great white dome of Old Abe's stately

home, for one brief moment the search was rewarded. I dimly caught a

hint of what men have tried to say in their world-old effort to imprison

a space in so divine a line that it shall hold only yearning devotion and

high-hearted hopes. Certainly the utmost rim of my first dome was

filled with the tumultuous impression of soldiers marching to death

for freedom's sake, of pioneers streaming westward to establish selfgovernment in yet another sovereign state. Only the great dome of St.

Peter's itself has ever clutched my heart as did that modest curve