"
Mr. Riddle, who saw him at this period, after some months' absence, says
he was shocked, on gaining admission to the President, "by his
appearance--that of a _baited, cornered man_, always on the defense
against attacks that he could not openly meet and defy or punish." Mr.
Carpenter, an inmate of the White House, says: "Absorbed in his papers,
he would become unconscious of my presence, while I intently studied
every line and shade of expression in that furrowed face. There were
days when I could scarcely look into it without crying. During the first
week of the battles of the Wilderness he scarcely slept at all. Passing
through the main hall of the domestic apartment on one of these days, I
met him, clad in a long morning wrapper, pacing back and forth a narrow
passage leading to one of the windows, his hands behind him, great black
rings under his eyes, his head bent forward upon his breast,--altogether
such a picture of the effects of sorrow, care, and anxiety as would have
melted the hearts of the worst of his adversaries, who so mistakenly
applied to him the epithets of tyrant and usurper."

Mr. Edward Dicey, the English historian, says: "Never in my knowledge
have I seen a sadder face than that of the late President during the
time his features were familiar to me. It is so easy to be wise after
the event; but it seems to me now that one ought somehow to have
foreseen that the stamp of a sad end was impressed by nature on that
rugged, haggard face. The exceeding sadness of the eyes and their
strange sweetness were the one redeeming feature in a face of unusual
plainness, and there was about them that odd, weird look, which some
eyes possess, of seeming to see more than the outer objects of the world
around."

Lincoln's family and friends strove to beguile him of his melancholy.
They took him to places of amusement; they walked and drove with him in
the pleasantest scenes about the capital; and above all, they talked
with him of times past, seeking to divert his mind from its present
distress by reviving memories of more joyous days. His old friends were,
as Mr. Arnold states, "shocked with the change in his appearance. They
had known him at his home, and at the courts in Illinois, with a frame
of iron and nerves of steel; as a man who hardly knew what illness was,
ever genial and sparkling with frolic and fun, nearly always cheery and
bright. Now they saw the wrinkles on his face and forehead deepen into
furr