ton.
"Article 2. This statue is to be placed in one of the squares of
Paris, to be chosen by the minister of the interior, and it shall
be his duty to execute the present decree."]

About the same time, if tradition may be trusted, the flags upon the
conquering Channel fleet of England were lowered to half-mast in token
of grief for the same event which had caused the armies of France to
wear the customary badges of mourning.

If some "traveler from an antique land" had observed these
manifestations, he would have wondered much whose memory it was that
had called them forth from these two great nations, then struggling
fiercely with each other for supremacy on land and sea. His wonder
would not have abated had he been told that the man for whom they
mourned had wrested an empire from one, and at the time of his death
was arming his countrymen against the other.

These signal honors were paid by England and France to a simple
Virginian gentleman who had never left his own country, and who when
he died held no other office than the titular command of a provisional
army. Yet although these marks of respect from foreign nations were
notable and striking, they were slight and formal in comparison with
the silence and grief which fell upon the people of the United States
when they heard that Washington was dead. He had died in the fullness
of time, quietly, quickly, and in his own house, and yet his death
called out a display of grief which has rarely been equaled in
history. The trappings and suits of woe were there of course, but what
made this mourning memorable was that the land seemed hushed with
sadness, and that the sorrow dwelt among the people and was neither
forced nor fleeting. Men carried it home with them to their firesides
and to their churches, to their offices and their workshops. Every
preacher took the life which had closed as the noblest of texts, and
every orator made it the theme of his loftiest eloquence. For more
than a year the newspapers teemed with eulogy and elegy, and both
prose and poetry were severely taxed to pay tribute to the memory of
the great one who had gone. The prose was often stilted and the verse
was generally bad, but yet through it all, from the polished sentences
of the funeral oration to the humble effusions of the obscurest poet's
corner, there ran a strong and genuine feeling, which the highest art
could not refine nor the clumsiest expression degrade.

From th