Page:American Boy's Life of William McKinley.djvu/344

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294
AMERICAN BOYS' LIFE

thronged with people and again the bells tolled solemnly, while the bands played their funeral dirges.

On went the procession, with thousands in line and a great multitude following, through streets heavily draped in black, and under arches of mourning, one erected by the school children who knew and loved him so well, on and on, out of the town and to the beautiful Westlawn Cemetery, where all was calm and peaceful and where his two little children had gone long years before.

As they placed him in that last resting-spot, a whole Nation stood still in silent prayer and in tears. For five minutes hardly a train in all these United States moved, no telegraphic wire was alive with messages, no street car jangled its bell, no ferry-boat ploughed its way across a busy river. In village and city, on the farm and in the busy thoroughfare, seventy-five millions of people stood as they had never stood before,—stood as if the blue dome of the sky covered one vast church, and they were all at service listening to that hymn which shall never die, "Nearer, My