into an angel of
oratory and the awkward arms and dishevelled hair were lost sight
of entirely in the wonderful beauty and lofty inspiration of that
magnificent address. The great audience immediately began to follow
his thought, and when he uttered that quotation from Douglass, "It is
written on the sky of America that the slaves shall some day be free,"
he had settled the question that he was to be the next President
of the United States. The applause was so-great that the building
trembled and I felt the windows shake behind me. Afterward, as we
walked home, I said to my elder brother again, "Wasn't it a great
thing to be introduced to all those people as the next President of
the United States?" and my elder brother very wisely said: "You do not
know whether he was really happy or not." Afterwards, in 1864, when
one of my soldiers was unjustly sentenced and his gray-haired mother
plead with me to use what influence I would have with the President, I
went to Washington and told the story to the President. He said he
had heard something about it from Mr. Stanton, and he said he would
investigate the matter, and he did afterward decide that the man
should not be put to death. At the close of that interview I said to
the President: "I beg your pardon, Mr. Lincoln, but is it not a most
exhausting thing to sit here hearing all these appeals and have all of
this business on your hands?" He laid his head on his hand, and in a
somewhat wearied manner, said, with a deep sigh: "Yes, yes; no man
ought to be ambitious to be President of the United States," and said
he, "When this war is over, and that won't be very long, I tell my
"Tad" that we will go back to the farm where I was happier as a boy
when I dug potatoes at twenty-five cents a day than I am now; I tell
him I will buy him a mule and a pony and he shall have a little cart
and he shall make a little garden in a field all his own," and the
President's face beamed as he arose from his chair in the delight of
excitement as he said: "Yes, I will be far happier than I have ever
been here." The next time I looked in the face of Abraham Lincoln was
in the east room of the White House at Washington as he lay in his
coffin. Not long ago at a Chautauqua lecture I was on the very farm
which he bought at Salem, Illinois, and looked around the place where
he had resolved to build a mansion, but which was never constructed.

Near my home in the Berkshires, Charles Dudley Warner was