he only one they had when I was with them), and very pleasant to
all around him. Never did I hear him utter an unkind word."

It seems impossible to arrive at all the causes of Lincoln's melancholy
disposition. He was, according to his most intimate friends, totally
unlike other people,--was, in fact, "a mystery." But whatever the
history or the cause,--whether physical reasons, the absence of domestic
concord, a series of painful recollections of his mother, of early
sorrows and hardships, of Anne Rutledge and fruitless hopes, or all
these combined,--Lincoln was a terribly sad and gloomy man. "I do not
think that he knew what happiness was for twenty years," says Mr.
Herndon. "'_Terrible_' is the word which all his friends used to
describe him in the black mood. 'It was terrible! It was terrible!' said
one to another." Judge Davis believes that Lincoln's hilarity was mainly
simulated, and that "his stories and jokes were intended to whistle off
sadness." "The groundwork of his social nature was sad," says Judge
Scott. "But for the fact that he studiously cultivated the humorous, it
would have been very sad indeed. His mirth always seemed to me to be put
on; like a plant produced in a hot-bed, it had an unnatural and
luxuriant growth." Mr. Herndon, Lincoln's law-partner and most intimate
friend, describes him at this period as a "thin, tall, wiry, sinewy,
grizzly, raw-boned man, looking 'woe-struck.' His countenance was
haggard and careworn, exhibiting all the marks of deep and protracted
suffering. Every feature of the man--the hollow eyes, with the dark
rings beneath; the long, sallow, cadaverous face intersected by those
peculiar deep lines; his whole air; his walk; his long silent reveries,
broken at long intervals by sudden and startling exclamations, as if to
confound an observer who might suspect the nature of his
thoughts,--showed he was a man of sorrows, not sorrows of to-day or
yesterday, but long-treasured and deep, bearing with him a continual
sense of weariness and pain. He was a plain, homely, sad, weary-looking
man, to whom one's heart warmed involuntarily because he seemed at once
miserable and kind."

Mr. Page Eaton, an old resident of Springfield, says: "Lincoln always
did his own marketing, even after he was elected President and before
he went to Washington. I used to see him at the butcher's or baker's
every morning, with his basket on his arm. He was kind and sociable,
and would always speak to ev