Identifier: sponsorsouvenira00unit (find matches)
Title: Sponsor souvenir album : history & reunion (1895)
Year: 1895 (1890s)
Authors: United Confederate Veterans
Subjects: United Confederate Veterans -- Anniversaries, etc United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Anniversaries, etc.
Publisher: (Columbus, Ohio : Terry Engraving Co., 1895.)
Contributing Library: Houston Public Library
Digitizing Sponsor: LYRASIS Members and Sloan Foundation

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Text Appearing Before Image:

STONEWALL JACKSON
(AT TWENTY-FOUR YEARS OF AGE)
"Let A.P. Hill prepare for action".
(Last command of General Jackson.)

Text Appearing After Image:

GEN. A. P. HILL

204 SPONSOR SOUVENIR ALBUM.

LITTLE GIFFEN, OF TENNESSEE.
By Frank O. Tichnok.

Out of the focal and foremost fire,
Out of the hospital walls as fire;
Smitten of grapeshot and gangrene
(Eighteenth battle and he sixteen!),
Specter, such as you seldom see,
"Little Giffen," of Tennessee!

"Take him, and welcome!" the surgeons said;
"Little the doctor can help the dead."
So we took him, and brought him where
The balm was sweet in the summer air;
And we laid him down on a wholesome bed—
Utter Lazarus from heel to head!

And we watched the war with bated breath,
Skeleton boy against skeleton death.
Months of torture, how many such?
Weary weeks of the stick and crutch;
And still a glint of the steel-blue eye
Told of a spirit that wouldnt die.

And didn't, nay, more! in deaths despite
The crippled skeleton "learned to write."
"Dear mother," at first, of course; and then
"Dear captain," inquiring about the men.
Captain's answer: "Of eighty and five,
GifTen and 1 are left alive.

Word of gloom from the war one day;
Johnston pressed at the front, they say.
Little Giffen was up and away;
A tear, his first, as he bade good-bye,
Dimmed the glint of his steel-blue eye.
"I'll write, if spared." There was news of the fight,
But none of GifTen. He did not write.

I sometimes fancy that, were I king
Of the princely Knights of the Golden Ring,
With the song of the minstrel in mine ear,
And the tender legend that trembles here,
I'd give the best on his bended knee.
The whitest soul of my chivalry.
For "Little GifTen," of Tennessee.

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