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. very 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

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.

The skill and success with which Mr. Lincoln would dispose of an embarrassing question or avoid premature committal to a policy advocated by others. is well known. He knew how to send applicants away in good humor even when they failed to extract the desired response.

A story told of him after General Cameron's retirement from the War Department illustrates this habit. Every one knows that Mr. Lincoln's Cabinet was chosen chiefly from his rivals for the Presidential nomination, and from considerations largely political. But the exigencies of the war demanded, in the opinion of many good Republicans, a reorganization of the Cabinet based on the special fitness of each member for the great work in hand. Of this opinion were some of the leading Republican Senators. After the retirement of General Cameron they held a caucus and appointed a committee to wait on the President. The committee represented that, inasmuch as the Cabinet had not been chosen with reference to the war, and had more or less lost the confidence of the country, and since the President had decided to select a new War Minister, they thought the occasion was opportune to change the whole seven Cabinet Ministers. They therefore earnestly advised him to make a clean sweep and select seven new men, and so restore the waning confidence of the country.

The President listened with patient courtesy, and when the Senators had concluded he said, with a characteristic gleam of humor in his eye:

They

"Gentlemen, your request for a change of the whole Cabinet because I have made one change reminds me of a story I once heard in Illinois of a farmer who was much troubled by skunks. annoyed his household at night, and his wife insisted. that he should take measures to get rid of them. One moonlight night he loaded his old shot-gun and stationed himself in the yard to watch for the intruders, his wife remaining in the house anxiously awaiting the result. After some time she heard the shot-gun go off, and in a few minutes the farmer entered the house. 'What luck had you?' said she. 'I hid myself behind the wood-pile,' said the old man, with the shot-gun pointed toward the henroost, and before long there appeared not one skunk but seven. I took aim, blazed away, killed one, and he raised such a fearful smell that I concluded it was best to let the other six go.'

With a hearty laugh the Senators retired, and nothing more was heard of Cabinet reconstruction.

One of Mr. Lincoln's most amiable qualities was the patience and gentleness with which he would listen to people who thought they had wrongs to redress or claims to enforce. But sometimes, when his patience had been abused for selfish or unworthy