General Grant understand one another, suppose you try to get along without the orders, and if Blair or Stanton make a fuss I may be called in as a referee, and I may decide in your favor."

The orders were never issued, and pleasant relations were maintained on that score all around.

That Abraham Lincoln was favored with a fund of humor and a sense of the ridiculous there can be no question; but as President he used those gifts, if they may be called gifts, for a worthy and laudable purpose. When oppressed with care and anxiety, beset with importunities he could not grant, humor was to him a relief, and an encouragement to his despondent listener. His sympathies were with the people and for the people, and his only ambition was that the Union might be preserved. It is a singular fact that all men who came in official or social relations with Abraham Lincoln while he was President were impressed with his unselfish patriotism and unyielding integrity.

A. H. MARKLAND.

THE

XVIII.

SCHUYLER COLFAX.

'HE careers of good and of great men are the true beacons of human progress. They are lights set upon a hill, illuminating the moral atmosphere around them, and their thoughts and deeds hallow the nations to which they belong, and become the most priceless legacies of mankind. Thus Moses, David, Solomon, Plato, Socrates, Xenophon, Seneca, Cicero and Epictetus, still speak to us from their tombs even more impressively than when they lived and spoke and walked upon the earth. Indeed, as Carlyle taught us, universal history is, after all, only the history of great men; and Ralph Waldo Emerson insists, with remarkable force and with unquestioned truth, that every institution is but the lengthened shadow of some great man who has passed away, as the Islamism of Mohammed, the Protestantism of Luther, the Jesuitism of Loyola, the Puritanism of Calvin, the Methodism of Wesley, the Quakerism of Fox, and the universal emancipation.

From the very beginning he believed exactly as when at the end. He compressed a whole volume of