register. As the words were spelled out slowly, one after the other, the operator repeated them, rehearsing with painful distinctness the assassin's shot, the leap on the stage floor, the falling head of the great patriot and martyr, the oozing wound, the escape of the guilty. It was the heart of the people throbbing with the pulsations of the passing vitality of their hero, in the deep darkness and silence of the night. Not a word was spoken; there were only the gloomy eyes and the firm-set teeth. It is one of the traditions of Iowa that on that night no "copperhead " went forth from his house, and that for days afterward none ventured to open his mouth anywhere over the rolling prairies of our loyal State. The Union heart was too deeply wounded; it was sullen and wrathful, and there was danger in the air.

JOHN N. KASSON.

25

A

XXII.

JAMES B. FRY.

LTHOUGH I do not remember to have seen

Lincoln until the day of his first inauguration as President, I knew him through my father. Pioneers from Kentucky to Illinois, they were friends from an early period. Lincoln was a private in the volunteer forces commanded by my father in the Black Hawk War of 1831-2. He was always a man of note among his associates, in the Indian campaign as well as in subsequent political campaigns, especially in the contest with Douglas for the United States Senate. My father was an ardent personal and political friend of Douglas, and in his circle it was looked upon as presumptuous and ridiculous for Abe Lincoln to compete with the "Little Giant" for the Senate of the United States.

The contest proved that the so-called rail-splitter was the real giant, and led to his selection for the head of the new party at Chicago in the summer of 1860, and to his election to the Presidency in the following autumn. Lincoln and his Illinois competitor, Stephen A. Douglas, formed a striking contrast.