ate in his own way, by sending Mr. Lincoln
his present.

"We can't do too much for Mr. Lincoln," his brother Harry had said
when he came home on a furlough, so tanned and sturdy that even Mrs.
Rosenfelt had to confess that his soldiering had not broken down his
health. And Morris's heart had reechoed the sentiment again and again,
especially when Harry was taken to one of the Washington hospitals and
wrote glowingly of the president's visits to the sick and wounded
soldiers. "He's not like a president--he's just like a father," he
wrote, and more than one bereaved household in those dark days
learned to agree with him.

For the sadly-tried man from Illinois was never too busy with affairs
of state to write a word of comfort to a mother who had lost her son
on the battlefield, never too harassed with his many duties to listen
to a plea for a furlough or a pardon. But, perhaps, of all the stories
that reached Morris at that time the account of Mr. Abraham Jonas of
Peoria meant the most.

Mr. Jonas was a Jewish citizen of Peoria, Illinois, and had been a
staunch friend and political associate of Lincoln before the latter
left Springfield for the White House. Strangely enough, Mr. Jonas's
four sons all enlisted in the Southern army. Towards the close of the
war, Abraham Jonas fell ill, and, learning from his doctors that his
disease would prove fatal, felt that he could never die in peace until
he had seen his son Charles, then a Confederate prisoner of war on
Johnson's Island, Lake Erie. The dying father appealed to his old
friend, and President Lincoln at once gave the order to parole Charles
Jonas for three weeks that he might visit his father's bedside.

"After that," admitted Mrs. Rosenfelt, wiping her eyes as she heard
the story from a Chicago friend of the Jonas family, "after that, I'll
forgive the president everything!" She never explained just why she
should feel called upon to forgive President Lincoln for anything, but
up to that time the good lady had entertained the notion that the
president had made the war and was entirely responsible for her son's
enlistment. "Things like that make you feel that there's good in
everybody's heart even in war time. Anyhow, the war can't last much
longer."

The great war did end that very year and in the spring of 1865 Morris
realized that at last he might send Mr. Lincoln his present. "Just for
a sort of extra celebration," he told himself, as he counted the money
he h