was my hero in those troublous times of the fifties.
I knew him only by sight for a long time, watching him go in and out of
the big white house where he lived. After a time I came to know him. I
was clerking in a coffee-importing house during the day and studying law
at night. Judge Adams took me into his office. He took me among his
friends. Abraham Lincoln was one of them.

"I remember the night I met Lincoln. Judge Adams had talked of him
often. He had been talking of him that day. 'Greatness,' he had said,
'is the holding of a great dream, not for yourself, but for others.
Abraham Lincoln has the dream. He has heard the voice, and seen the
vision, and he is climbing up to Sinai. You must meet him, James.'
That night I met him in the old white house.

"We were in the front parlor of the old house," James Thorold continued,
resetting the scene until his only listener knew that it was more real
to him than the room through which he paced, "when some one said, 'Mr.
Lincoln.' I looked up to see a tall, awkward man standing in the arched
doorway. Other men have said that they had to know Lincoln a long time
to feel his greatness. My shame is the greater that I felt his greatness
on the instant when I met his eyes.

"There was talk of war that night. Lincoln did not join in it, I
remember, although I do not recall what he said. But when he rose to go
I went with him. We walked down the street past dooryards where lilacs
were blooming, keeping together till we crossed the river. There our
ways parted. I told him a little of what Judge Adams had said of him.
He laughed at the praise, waving it away from himself. 'It's a good
thought, though,' he said, 'a great dream for others. But we need more
than the dreaming, my friend. When the time comes, will you be ready?'

"I held out my hand to him in pledge.

"My way home that night took me past the armory where the Zouaves, the
boys whom Ellsworth trained, were drilling. You remember Ellsworth's
story, Peter? He was the first officer to die in the war." The boy
nodded solemnly, and the man went on. "With Abraham Lincoln's voice
ringing in my ears I enlisted.

"Years afterward, when Abraham Lincoln was President, war came. I'd seen
Lincoln often in the years between." James Thorold stopped his restless
pacing and stood at the end of the table away from Peter, leaning over
it slightly, as he seemed to keep up his story with difficulty. "He came
often to Judge Adams's house.