She reads aloud, in a soft voice that was never intended to carry, Lincoln's prediction that "The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but can never forget what they did here."

Mary Beth Gibbs pauses to sigh again. She is fighting back tears. She is thinking, as so many are wondering, how those very words will ring again this morning. It has been nearly 139 years since Lincoln spoke them on this same gently sloping hill, but now they will be recited by another politician over a battlefield as different as the 21st century is to the 19th.

This morning at ground zero, at the base of what was once the most impressive office structure in the world, New York Governor George Pataki will read the Gettysburg Address, 268 words that begin with a phrase every American child knows -- "Four score and seven years ago" -- and ends with a vow that every American adult cherishes: ". . . that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Unlike Lincoln, Mr. Pataki will not puzzle over how the words are received. But there will likely be a lack of cheering or wild applause, just like Nov. 19, 1863, when Lincoln spoke from the two sheets of scribbled notes, and people will still likely be astonished at how brief it is, how quickly and beautifully the 10 sentences roll by.

One certainty is that Mr. Pataki's image will be captured by hundreds, thousands of cameras, and instantly transported to millions of homes around the world. Lincoln, on the other hand, was up and done and sitting back down before the official photographer could even set up.

"Little did he know," says Mrs. Gibbs, who has come here from Columbia, N.C., to tour the famous Civil War battlefield with her husband Brad and grown daughter Julie.

He could not, of course, have known. Lincoln, in fact, was not even the speaker the crowds came to hear that day in late fall when they dedicated the military cemetery at Gettysburg. They came to hear Edward Everett, the greatest speaker of the day, who spoke for two hours, pulled every classical trick in the book of oratory and virtually fell to his chair a spent force at the end of a speech that is no longer even recalled.

Lincoln, who some historians say was only invited as an afterthought, had been asked to make a "few appropriate remarks," much as if it were a ribbon they were cutting rather than a national monument they were raising to the 51,000 dead, wounded or missing from this most hideous yet pivotal battle in U.S. history. More than 3,700 Civil War dead are buried in Gettysburg, nearly 1,000 of them under stones simply marked "unknown."

It is impossible to come to Gettysburg, just as it is now impossible to go to ground zero, and not think of the overwhelming tragedy, the violence.

The National Cemetery at Gettysburg exists because those who would have to see the destruction every day could not abide it.

The cemetery they built is a glorious tribute to the bravery, the recklessness and the loss that took place here in the first week of July, 1863.

Even then, it was seen as a turning point in a desperate time for the split country and Lincoln was determined to mark it as such.

No one is quite sure of the exact number of words in the address given, but historians are certain Lincoln did not, as folklore has it, write his notes on the back of an envelope as he hurried from Washington to join in the ceremony.

He spoke after much consideration. As Garry Wills, the author of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Lincoln at Gettysburg, put it, when the crowd dispersed that day, "They walked off, from those curving graves on the hillside, under a changed sky, into a different America."

Mr. Wills himself has called the reading of Lincoln's address inappropriate for the marking of last year's tragedy -- the Twin Towers are not a battlefield, and those who died were not soldiers knowingly heading into battle.

Yet a great many Americans will think it absolutely appropriate, a perfect reminder of how their country has a way of rising from the ashes.

Mrs. Gibbs cast her eyes again over the remarkable words.

". . . we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain . . ."

She pauses, again sighing. "It will have some impact," she says. "How could it not?"

Tomorrow: Roy MacGregor's final stop -- Shanksville, Pa., site of the crash of Flight 93.
The Gettysburg Address

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that the nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate -- we cannot consecrate -- we cannot hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.