urging me, but I don't think it best now;
do _you_ think so, Henderson?" To which the latter promptly replied
that he did not think so; that such a measure, under existing
conditions, would, in his judgment, be ill-advised and possibly
disastrous. "Just what I think," said the President, "but they
are constantly coming and urging me, sometimes alone, sometimes in
couples, and sometimes _all three together,_ but constantly pressing
me." With that he walked across the room to a window and looked
out upon the Avenue. Sure enough, Wilson, Stevens, and Sumner were
seen approaching the Executive Mansion. Calling his visitor to
the window and pointing to the approaching figures, in a tone
expressing something of that wondrous sense of humor that no burden
or disaster could wholly dispel, he said, "Henderson, did you ever
attend an old field school?" Henderson replied that he did.

"So did I," said the President; "what little education I
ever got in early life was in that way. I attended an old field
school in Indiana, where our only reading-book was the Bible. One
day we were standing up reading the account of the three Hebrew
children in the fiery furnace. A little tow-headed fellow who
stood beside me had the verse with the unpronounceable names; he
mangled up Shadrach and Meshach woefully, and finally went all
to pieces on Abednego. Smarting under the blows which, in accordance
with the old-time custom, promptly followed his delinquency, the
little fellow sobbed aloud. The reading, however, went round, each
boy in the class reading his verse in turn. The sobbing at length
ceased, and the tow-headed boy gazed intently upon the verses ahead.

"Suddenly he gave a pitiful yell, at which the school-master
demanded:

"'What is the matter with you now?'

"'Look there,' said the boy, pointing to the next verse, 'there
comes them same damn three fellows again!'"

As indicating the slight concern Mr. Lincoln had about money-making,
as well as the significance of the expression "well-off" half a
century or so ago, the following conversation, related by Judge
Weldon, is in point.

At the opening of the De Witt Circuit Court in May, 1859, just a
year before his first nomination for the Presidency, Mr. Lincoln
was present, unattended for possibly the first time by his life-long
friend, Major John T. Stuart. Upon inquiry from Weldon as to
whether Stuart was coming, Lincoln replied, "No, Stuart told me
that he would