Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 34, Number 61, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 April 1902 — THE MEMORY OF HER BOY. [ARTICLE]

THE MEMORY OF HER BOY.

How the Empress Engeale Vm Affected by an American Poem. An American woman, a noted reader and elocutionist, relates a touching incident in which she had a part during her stay in England. The present queen, then Princess of Wales, gave a luncheon on board the royal yacht.* The elocutionist received an invitation, and accepted. Among the royal personages present was-the sad-eyed, beautiful Eugenie, the dethroned Empress of the French, who stltt grieved for ; her Son, killed by the Zulus of South Afriea. “After lunch, and during the idle hour before tea was served,” says the elocutionist, “the princess asked me if I would recite something. I had often recited for her royal highness before, but on this occasion she wished me to do so especially for the Empress Eugenie.- ———* * 1 “1 asked the princess if she had any choice as to what I should recite. She said no, but suggested one of the many characteristic little American poems she had heard me recite before. So 1 decided to give ‘Kentucky Belle.’ “Most Americans know the poem, with its pathetic story of a thoroughbred horse which a woman gave to one of Morgan’s riders, a sixteeu-year-old boy whom she had nursed from death to life, to carry him back to his home. “The empress was close to me. I saw the tears gradually gather in her great, sad eyes, and fall silently down her* pale cheeks. I had touched, and touched deeply, a chord. Her memory took her back to Africa, where her dead boy lay pierced to the heart by the spears nf the «a-rages “When the poem ended the empress rose, and coming up to me, folded me to her heart, and with a voice trembling with emotion, said: ‘God bless you, my child! You have made me feel as I have never felt since my poor boy was killed—God bless you! I shall never forget this day!’ Then she kissed me, and drawing me to a seat by her and holding my hand in hers, she talked to me for a long time.”