a
pleasant word.

The celebration of Longfellow's seventy-fifth birthday by
school-children all over the country is something that those children
must be glad to think of now--glad to remember that the poet knew how
much they cared for him and for what he had written. Even the blind
children, who have to read with their fingers, were enjoying his songs
with the rest. How pleasant that must have been to him! Certainly, as it
seems to me, the best tribute that the young people of the country can
pay to his memory is to become more familiar with his poems.

We should not wait until a great and good man has left us before giving
him honor, or trying to understand what he has done for us. A dreary
world ours would be, if there were no poets' songs echoing through it;
and we may be proud of our country that it has a poetry of its own,
which it is for us to know and possess for ourselves.

Longfellow has said:

"What the leaves are to the forest
With light and air and food,
Ere their sweet and tender juices
Have been hardened into wood,
That to the world, are children":

and something like this we may say of his songs. There is in all true
poetry a freshness of life which makes the writer of it immortal.

The singer so much beloved has passed from sight, but the music of his
voice is in the air, and, listening to it, we know that he can not die.

[Illustration]

=Inauguration Day=

_March 4_

The date was settled by the old Congress of the Confederation in 1788,
when the procedure was established for the election of a President. It
was decreed that the Electoral College should meet on the first
Wednesday of January, the votes be counted by the House of
Representatives on the first Wednesday of February, and the President be
inaugurated on the first Wednesday of March. This March date was the
4th. March 4 has been Inauguration Day ever since.

=HOW A PRESIDENT IS INAUGURATED=

BY CLIFFORD HOWARD

As you will remember, Thomas Jefferson was the first President of our
country to be inaugurated at Washington. This took place in the year
1801, when our national capital was not much more than a year old; and
you may imagine that the city was a very different-looking place from
what it is to-day.

But now instead of a straggling town with a few muddy streets and about
three thousand inhabitants, Jefferson