oving with the
easy yet rapid pace of veterans in cadence step. As a mere spectacle
this march of the mightiest host the continent has ever seen was grand
and imposing, but it was not as a spectacle alone that it affected the
beholder. It was no holiday parade. It was an army of citizens on their
way home after a long and terrible war. Their clothes were worn, and
pierced with bullets, their banners had been torn with shot and shell,
and lashed in the winds of many battles. The very drums and fifes had
called out the troops to night alarms, and sounded the onset on historic
fields. The whole country claimed these heroes as part of themselves.
They were not soldiers by profession or from love of fighting; they had
become soldiers only to save their country's life. Now, done with war,
they were going joyously and peaceably back to their homes to take up
the tasks they had willingly laid down in the hour of their country's
need.

Friends loaded them with flowers as they swung down the Avenue--both men
and officers, until some were fairly hidden under their fragrant burden.
Grotesque figures were not absent, as Sherman's legions passed with
their "bummers" and their regimental pets. But with all the shouting
and the joy there was, in the minds of all who saw it, one sad and
ever-recurring thought--the memory of the men who were absent, and who
had, nevertheless, so richly earned the right to be there. The soldiers
in their shrunken companies thought of the brave comrades who had
fallen by the way; and through the whole vast army there was passionate
unavailing regret for their wise, gentle and powerful friend Abraham
Lincoln, gone forever from the big white house by the Avenue--who had
called the great host into being, directed the course of the nation
during the four years that they had been battling for its life, and to
whom, more than to any other, this crowning peaceful pageant would have
been full of deep and happy meaning.

Why was this man so loved that his death caused a whole nation to forget
its triumph, and turned its gladness into mourning? Why has his fame
grown with the passing years until now scarcely a speech is made or a
newspaper printed that does not have within it somewhere a mention of
his name or some phrase or sentence that fell from his lips? Let us see
if we can, what it was that made Abraham Lincoln the man that he became.

A child born to an inheritance of want; a boy growing into a narrow
worl