Representing
nothing on God's earth now,
And naught in the
waters below it,
As a pledge
of a Nation that's dead and gone,
Keep it, dear
friend, and show it;
Show it to
those who will lend an ear
To the tale that
this trifle can tell,
Of a
liberty born of a patriot's dream,
Of a storm-cradled
nation that fell.
Too poor to
possess the precious ores,
And too much of a
stranger to borrow,
We issued
today our promise to pay,
And hoped to
redeem on the morrow. .
The days
rolled by and weeks became years,
But our coffers
were empty still;
Coin was so
rare, that the treasury'd quake
If a dollar should
drop in the till.
But the
faith that was in us was strong indeed,
And our poverty
well we discerned,
And this
little check represented the pay
That our-
suffering veterans earned.
We knew it
had hardly a value in gold,
Yet as gold each
soldier received it
It gazed in
our eyes with a promise to pay,
And each Southern
patriot believed it.
Just our
boys thought little of price or of pay~
Or of bills that
were overdue;
We knew if
it brought us our bread today,
'Twas the best our
poor country could do.
Keep it; it
tells all our history over,
From the birth of
the dream to the last;
Modest, and
born of the angel Hope,
Like our hope of
success, "it passed."
Major
S. A. Jones.
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