The Birmingham age-herald., 1905-04-23
DIR. TALMAGE'S SERMON.


oS ANGELES, Cal. April 16.-From
 the story of an iniquitous bargain 1% and the use to which the tainted money earned by il was put the preacher in this sermon draws lessons of the evils that come from avarice and cupidity The text is Matthew xvii, 5, Wherefore that field was called the field of blood.
 A grewsome fascination hovers about the bricks, and the stones, and the boards, and the grounds where lived and wrought some of the worlds evil workers. Island of Blennerhasset! Wonderful name, rich in historical associations l sec the boats every spring and summer and fall filled with sightseers almost daily pushing out upon the Ohio river to seek this little island near Marietta. Why? Is It summer playground? Is it an Isle oi Wight? Is it's center mansion? Are it's banks terraeed? Are its trees filled with sweetest of songsters as they were once in the haleyon days when it's owner Harman Blennerhasset, took his bride there and changed this island into an Edenic garden as Nebuchadnezzar, who had courted Princess Amytis among the hills of Ecbatana, to humor the wnlms of his queen, had lifted high for the wonderment of the world the famous hanging gardens of Babylon?' Oh, ne Blennerhasset island todas is of little intrinsic value. A few scrub trees, few rocks, perhaps a few novels such as can be seen in scores of islands in the middle of this Ohio river, are all the aesthetic beauties it has to offer to the landscape artist But to the historian Blennerhas- set has the same fascination as have the broken walls of Wentworth castle. Blen- nerhasset is immortal on account or the infamous history of Aaron Burr. That is where the ex-vice- president stopped on his way to establish a monarchy in the great southwest It has an evil fame as the rendezvous of the traitorous con- spiritors of that day, just as Is that house in a side street of Washington in which Mary E. Surratt welcomed the thugs of the later time who were plot ting the assassination of Abraham Lin coin.
 The people in swarms used to go to an old-fashioned New England house where was kept a bloody shirt the relic of a dastardly deed of the revolutionary war As l remember the story, an Amer ican officer was surrounded by the enemy, while eating dinner in this very house. When called upon to surrender he handed over his sword, hilt first. to one of his captors. Instead of the Brit ish soldier receiving 1t and placing his captive under guard. he took the sword and plunged it through the heart of his helpless victim. The rent In the shirt showed where the sword had pierced it's way into the bleeding flesh Of course such a ecowardly act as this was con- demned by the British army as well as by the American. But the condemnation of the murderer has not anything to do with my thought The one fact I want to impress upon you Is this: Scores and hundreds of people naturally seek in fascinated awe the pIaces where a great crime has been committed. The star In the floor of the Pennsylvania depot. where Garfield was shot, for years had It's thousands of sightseers. The scene of the Chicago Haymarket riot, the place where Edward Stokes shot James Fisk, the sausage vat where Leutgert disinte- grated the body of his murdered wife, all have had their morbid sightseers even as the room in which George Washington breathed his last has it's daily visitors
 HTha Eield of RIondV