the White House and asked for the President's autograph, Mr. Lincoln said:

"Will you have it on a card or on a sheet of paper?"

"If the choice rested with myself," said the jovial doctor, "I should prefer it at the foot of a commission."

Mr. Lincoln smiled, and shook his head as if he did not see it in that light, but he sat down and wrote a few pleasant lines, adding his legible signature, "A. Lincoln."

After having signed the famous Emancipation Proclamation on the 1st of January, 1863, Mr. Lincoln carefully put away the pen which he had used, for Mr. Sumner, who had promised it to his friend George Livermore, of Cambridge, the author of an interesting work on slavery. It was a steel pen with a wooden handle, the end of which had been gnawed by Mr. Lincoln-a habit that he had when composing anything that required thought.

Mr. Lincoln used to wear at the White House, in the morning and after dinner, a long-skirted, faded dressing-gown, belted around his waist, and slippers. His favorite attitude when listening-and he was a good listener-was to lean forward and clasp his left knee with both hands, as if fondling it, and his face would then wear a sad, wearied look. But when the time came for him to give an opinion on what he had

heard, or to tell a story, which something said "reminded him of," his face would lighten up with its homely, rugged smile, and he would run his fingers through his bristly black hair, which would stand out in every direction like that of an electric experiment doll.

Mr. Lincoln's part in subduing the rebellion will be better appreciated as time clears away the mists of race prejudice and the fogs of political intrigue. He was surrounded by able men, widely differing in opinion on the negro, but each one hoping that he would be President of the United States. To curb their ambitions, to humor their prejudices, and to make them, as he once expressed it, “pull in the traces," was no easy task, and required such a selfsacrificing man, of large brain and heart, to direct public affairs, as was Abraham Lincoln.

BENJAMIN PERLEY POORE.

XII.

TITIAN J. COFFEY.

EW men have had the opportunity to render

FEW

services so important and beneficial to the country and humanity as Abraham Lincoln. But we may question whether his career as President and Emancipator through the trying scenes of the great Civil War, or even the tragic and touching incidents of his untimely death, would have excited and kept alive the affectionate and ever-increasing interest in his character, if that character had not been marked by traits, some of them quaint, original and homely, that appealed to the common heart of mankind and revealed that touch of nature that makes the whole world kin. It has been often and truthfully said of him that he was a man whose heart lay close to the great popular heart and felt its beatings. Even after he had reached the perilous elevation of the White House, where the truth is apt to be seen through refracted mediums, he never for a moment lost the faculty of reading the mind of those whom he called “the plain people." In truth he was, by birth, education, experience and sympathy, one of "the

very

plain people" himself, and the traits that make him so uniquely interesting were simply the outgrowth of a mind original and vigorous, and a kindly heart developed by and taking shape from the modes of thought and expression, the habits and manner of life of the people amid whom he had been brought up and lived. Born in England or Massachusetts, and educated in conventional fashion at Oxford or Harvard, he would doubtless have been a man of mark and power, but he would not have been the Abraham Lincoln whom the people knew and loved. The training of the schools would probably have polished away, not indeed the native humor and shrewd faculty of observation, but that quaint and original habit of thought and speech which found constant expression in racy and effective phrase and in stories of Western life, often homely but never obscene, and always singularly apt in illustration.

But I am not writing an essay on Mr. Lincoln's character or genius. My less ambitious work is to record a few examples of his "preaching by parables," and of his habit of condensing an idea into a single telling phrase.

When these incidents happened I may premise that I was in the public service, and, by virtue of a custom established by Mr. Lincoln, I had occasional access to the Cabinet meetings during the absence of my departmental chief, the Attorney-General.