We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
212 ROAMIN' IN THE GLOAMIN'
try and my dead son. Occasionally I was encouraged in a very difficult task by incidents which proved to me that, after all, America was really with the Old Country in sentiment and ideals and in her determination to put a stop to the Bloody Thing. A poem which appeared about me in one of the New York weekly journals gave me much pleasure at the time. I came across it a few days ago when rummaging among my American documents and readers of my memoirs may forgive me if I reprint it here.
THE FIERY CROSS (Dedicated to Harry Lauder) He stood behind the footlights and he set the crowd a-laughing With the same old crooning chuckle that we loved in other years, And only those who knew could guess the grief behind the daffing But for those who did, the laughter had a secret salt of tears. Then at the last he came out in his grass-green coat and bonnet With his gaudy tartans coloured like a garden in the sun, The same quaint little figure — but a different face was on it When he sang about the laddies that so well had fought and won.
A face lined hard with furrows where the plough of pain had driven. Blue eyes that now were shadow-set through many a sleepless night, The face of one who more than life ungrudgingly had given Who called on us to do as well — and, ah ! we owned his right. We saw in him the Fiery Cross of Scotland, charred and gory And our spirit burned within us to the challenge that he gave, For the player was a prophet as he spoke his people's glory, "We're a wee land, and a puir land, but, by God above, we're brave."
Please do not think for a moment that I take the liberty of reprinting these verses because I agree with their all too flattering picture of myself at the time of which I am writing. But they certainly represented the spirit in which I appeared before the American public in 191 7. The authoress signed herself "Amelia J. Burr," but I do not know her and never met her. Many different people sent me copies of the New York Outlook in which the poem appeared and the mere fact that they did so showed that my efforts were being generally appreciated — and understood.
My theatre work was interspersed daily with attendances at Rotary and Kiwanis Club meetings, with trips to U. S. Training Camps, or cantonments as they were called, and