even questionable loyalty from McClellan. At the very time McClellan was writing his friends how he "despised the old dotard because he defers to me so much," Lincoln was refusing the demand of the Committee on the Conduct of the War for the removal of McClellan.

Once, in a perilous hour, Mr. Lincoln went to McClellan's headquarters to consult him. McClellan was out, attending the wedding of a member of his staff. Mr. Lincoln waited three hours. McClellan came in and went upstairs. Lincoln, thinking McClellan did not know the President was waiting to see him, sent a note to the General that he, the President, wanted to see him on important war matters. The servant returned with this message: "Tell Lincoln that General McClellan has gone to bed." Even this almost incredible insult Lincoln condoned, doubtless because he felt that the exigencies of the hour demanded that he should. He held the pompous little McClellan in the hollow of his hand, and had but to turn it edgewise to let the peacock of the Army fall into oblivion.

On another occasion, Mr. Lincoln had an engagement with McClellan and two other officers. McClellan paid no attention to the appointment. The other officers spoke their minds freely in re

gard to McClellan's treatment of the President. But Lincoln was not moved from his consistent purpose to think only of McClellan's value to the country.

McClellan had at last to go. He would not fight, and fighting after all was his official business. There was no other reason why he should be the Commander of the Army. But in his disposition of McClellan's case as in that of Seward, Stanton, Chase, and Blair, Lincoln was never thinking of himself, intent only on the fulfilment of his oath of office to preserve the Union, living out the words of the Man of Nazareth.

CHAPTER XXXI

THE CHARM OF SIMPLE GOODNESS

As a wilderness lad in Kentucky, as a youth in the wilds of Indiana, as a struggling man in Illinois, and finally, as bearer of the Nation's burdens, it could be said of Lincoln as Wordsworth wrote of Milton:

So didst thou travel on life's common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on itself did lay.

There still lives in Springfield an aged woman who told a recent visitor that when she was a little girl waiting with trunk packed to take her first railway journey, Mr. Lincoln passed the house and finding her in tears lest she should miss her train, took her cheerily by the hand, flung her trunk upon his stalwart shoulder, and got her to the train in time.

Mr. Lincoln's visit to the Five Points Mission in New York can never be forgotten, if only to recall how little children gathered round him and

called forth from the Great Commoner the quiet comment to his friend: "I have now a better understanding than ever before of what the Saviour meant when He said 'Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.'

Lincoln loved to play with children. When Miss Tarbell in the nineties was preparing her biography of Lincoln, she found still living in Washington men and women who as children there in the sixties had played with Lincoln. Said Mr. Francis P. Blair, "the boys for hours at a time played 'town ball' on the vast lawn at his grandfather's place near Washington, and Mr. Lincoln drove out there frequently and would join ardently in the sport. I remember vividly how he ran with the children; how long were his strides and how far his coat-tails stuck out behind, and how we tried to hit him with the ball as he ran the bases. He entered into the spirit of the play as completely as any of us."

An aged conductor of the Chicago and Alton Railroad tells a story which illustrates the mysterious distinction simple goodness gave to Lincoln. Many famous men were wont to travel on that road: Stephen A. Douglas, Norman Judd, Lyman Trumbull, David Davis, as well as Abraham Lincoln.

He was the most folksy of any of them [said the conductor to Mr. J. E. Edwards]. He put on no airs. He did not hold himself distant from any man; but there was something about him which we plain people couldn't explain that made us stand a little in awe of him. I now know what it was, but didn't then. It was because he was a greater man than any other we had ever seen. You could get near him in a sort of neighbourly way, as though you had always known him, but there was something tremendous between you and him all the time. I have eaten with him many times at the railroad eating houses, and you get very neighbourly if you eat together in a railroad restaurant. At least we did in those days. Everybody tried to get as near Lincoln as possible when he was eating because he was such good company, but we always looked at him with a kind of wonder. We couldn't exactly make him out. Sometimes I would see what looked like a dreadful loneliness in his face, and I used to wonder what he was thinking about. Whatever it was he was thinking all alone. It wasn't a solemn look, like Stephen A. Douglas sometimes had. Douglas sometimes made me think of an owl. He used to stare at you with his great dark eyes in a way that frightened you. Lincoln never frightened anybody. No one was afraid of him, but there was something about him that made plain folks feel toward him a good deal as a child feels toward his father, because you know every child looks upon his father as a wonderful man.

Frederick Douglass-not long up from slavery --became a man of consequence in Civil War days.