THE LUKE LIGHTWOOD LEGACY. 



I'd one foot in the stirrup, a hand in his mane, 



As he took the sod bank in his stride, 

 I could feel he was going and gave him the spur, 



He responded and won, then lunged forward and died 

 With the cheers in his ears and the sweat on his hide. 



'Twas a glorious death, but a few of us cried. 

 His four shoes are down stairs on the wall. 



All of the curious and unemployed on the lower 

 end of Manhatten Island were at the Battery on the 

 morning of August 10, 1888, to see the City of New 

 York finish her maiden trip and bring into port James 

 G. Blaine, the Plumed Knight of Maine, who was re- 

 turning from a coaching trip through Great Britain 

 with Andrew Carnegie. That morning I was detailed 

 for a trip to one of the Long Island tracks, and on 

 reaching the South Ferry station of the elevated I de- 

 cided to stop over a boat or two to see what had been 

 heralded as the finest passenger vessel that had ever 

 sailed for the port of New York. Those who had 

 glasses soon picked her up in the lower bay, and in a 

 short time she swept by the Statue of Liberty, on 

 Bedloe's Island, and passed the cheering and handker- 

 chief-waving multitude on the Battery on her way to 

 a pier in the North River. As she steamed by old 

 Castle Garden, which is now only a memory, I heard 

 some one in a sing-song voice say : 



"She walks the water like a thing of life." 



"And see her lines ; they are as fine as those of the 

 high-mettled racers I rode when a lad in Jersey." 



