de above you. When you reach the top you stand between two
mansions, large, handsome and substantial, but with nothing about
them to indicate the character of either. That on the left is the
Presidential country house; that directly before you, is the 'Rest,' for
soldiers who are too old for further service . . . In the graveyard near
at hand there are numberless graves--some without a spear of grass to
hide their newness--that hold the bodies of volunteers.

"While we stood in the soft evening air, watching the faint trembling of
the long tendrils of waving willow, and feeling the dewy coolness that
was flung out by the old oaks above us, Mr. Lincoln joined us, and stood
silent, too, taking in the scene.

"'How sleep the brave who sink to rest, By all their country's wishes
blest," he said, softly. . .

"Around the 'Home' grows every variety of tree, particularly of the
evergreen class. Their branches brushed into the carriage as we passed
along, and left us with that pleasant woody smell belonging to leaves.
One of the ladies, catching a bit of green from one of these intruding
branches, said it was cedar, and another thought it spruce.

"'Let me discourse on a theme I understand,' said the President. 'I
know all about trees in right of being a backwoodsman. I'll show you
the difference between spruce, pine and cedar, and this shred of green,
which is neither one nor the other, but a kind of illegitimate
cypress. He then proceeded to gather specimens of each, and explain the
distinctive formation of foliage belonging to each."(11)

Those summer nights of July, 1864, had many secrets which the tired
President musing in the shadows of the giant trees or finding solace
with the greatest of earthly minds would have given much to know. How
were Gilmore and Jaquess faring? What was really afoot in Canada? And
that unnatural silence of the Vindictives, what did that mean? And the
two great armies, Grant's in Virginia, Sherman's in Georgia, was there
never to be stirring news of either of these? The hush of the moment,
the atmosphere of suspense that seemed to envelop him, it was just what
had always for his imagination had such strange charm in the stories of
fated men. He turned again to Macbeth, or to Richard II, or to Hamlet.
Shakespeare, too, understood these mysterious pauses--who better!

The sense of the impending was strengthened by the alarms of some of his
best friends. They besought him to abandon his avowed