“Our Helen”
On the day of the Dewey parade in New York, Miss Gould was in front of her house, on a platform she had erected for the small children of certain Asylums. Mayor Van Wyck told Admiral Dewey who she was, and the Admiral stood up in his carriage and bowed to her three times. Then the word went down the line that Miss Gould was there, and every company saluted her as it passed.
But it was when a body of young recruits stopped for a moment before her door that the real excitement began.
“She shan’t marry a foreign prince,” they cried, tossing their hats and stamping their feet. “She’s Helen, our Helen, and she shall not marry a foreign prince.”
“AMERICA”
Miss Gould’s patriotism is very real and intense, and is not confined to times of war. Two years ago, she caused fifty thousand copies of the national hymn, “America,” to be printed and distributed among the pupils of the public schools of New York.
“I believe every one should know that hymn and sing it,” she declared, “if he sings no other. I would like to have the children sing it into their very souls, till it becomes a part of them.”
She strongly favors patriotic services in the churches on the Sunday preceding the Fourth of July, when she would like to hear such airs as “America,” “Hail Columbia,” and “The Star Spangled Banner,” and see the sacred edifices draped in red, white, and blue.