to, we'll-get-along-without-a-cross-word-or-action-and

we'll-live-in-peace-and-harmony-like-good-neighbors.'

Then Lincoln lifted at the two horns, dropped the goat over a high fence, and walked up the street.

CHAPTER 134

In his younger days Lincoln had said on the stump that usury is wrong; the Bible was right; to loan money at interest is unjust. But in 1859 he loaned $3,000.00 to Norman B. Judd at ten per cent, took Judd's note for the amount, and came into possession of a quitclaim deed, dated November 10, 1859, from Norman B. Judd and wife to Abraham Lincoln, of seventeen lots in Riddle's subdivision, and ten acres of land along the right of way of the M. & M. Railway in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Besides this property he had a lot in the town of Lincoln, Illinois, in connection with his fee for incorporating the town; a farm of 120 acres in Crawford County, Iowa, and forty acres in Tama County, this being land received from the Government for his Black Hawk War service. This, with ownership of his two-story cottage and lot in Springfield, and collectible bills he had out, made him worth between $15,000 and $25,000.

In earlier years he had been reckless about promises to pay; he exaggerated his future available cash. Since then he had grown careful in estimates as to cash he might raise, present or future. "I could not raise ten thousand dollars if it would save me from the fate of John Brown," he wrote on March 17, 1860, replying to a query as to whether he was willing to stake that amount on his chances for political success that year. He had come into possession of enough property to give him understanding of the feeling of property responsibility, or the fear of property

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dispossession, or the slippery and fugitive character of property, and the social and political attributes and organizations that collect and cluster for mutual protection around property. That a small gold coin placed over a verse in the Bible hides that verse, was an illustration he used often. Had he chosen to develop the property instinct, and sharpen his property scent, as he had chosen to develop his political instinct, he would have rivaled Judge Davis, the millionaire landowner, who was the leading manager of the campaign to nominate Lincoln for President.

The frugal and careful ways of Lincoln in handling property, his scruples and fears about the slightest sort of cheating, his code of clean and exact justice as seen by Davis, Fell, and Judd, was an element in their support of him, and was an argument they could employ with others. They could say that Lincoln would be honest and just in the handling of property and of property owners, if he should be made President of the United States. It was true that in Connecticut Lincoln had told the striking shoe-factory workers, "Thank God we have a country where workingmen have the right to strike," but this, when discussed, was taken as political good-fellowship, or at least as not connected with the main issues of the campaign. Also the dangers that organized labor could threaten property with were not seriously thought of; labor unions were few, scattered, and weak. Their development was yet to come. Of him as man, lawyer, or politician, as custodian and caretaker of property, the managers of Lincoln as a presidential dark horse had, in their twenty years' close acquaintance with him, seen and heard nothing to indicate that he stood for anything else than stanch security for private and public property.

Lincoln had often spoken of property rights in a scornful way, as compared with human rights, but he had in mind, they believed, slave property, which was all in the southern states. And even of this property he did not speak in the violent way of the Abolitionists who were willing to confiscate it. In the matter of railroads, banks, gas and light companies, land corporations, they were familiar with his record as one of strict scruples; no crooked or shady deal could be named.

He took a train for Chicago, in March of 1860, on the Sand-bar case. This made four times he had taken a train to Chicago, carrying his papers on the Sand-bar case. The ownership of land at the mouth of the Chicago River, "shore land," was at issue; Lincoln was defending the title of William Jones and Sylvester Marsh as owners. Jones had hard days on the witness stand; the complainant's lawyers tore at him as if he were a swindler, cocked their eyes at him as though in the presence of a rascal; Lincoln would greet Jones as he left the stand, take his hand, and laugh: "Don't be discouraged, Mr. Jones. There are those who are better lawyers than gentlemen." The lawyers on both sides, and the judge, were dinner guests one evening, and finished with a toast, "May Illinois furnish the

next President of the United States," to which all Lincoln Republicans and Douglas Democrats present drank heartily. Lincoln stopped at the Tremont House, sat for the sculptor, Leonard W. Volk, to make a life mask, visited Evanston and Waukegan, and went into a little candy store at State and Adams streets and forgot to carry away his handy pocket dictionary. The decision in the Sand-bar case was again in favor of Lincoln's clients; which started action to send the case up to the United States Supreme Court.

He looked in on Whitney's office in the Metropolitan Block. Whitney had become a Chicago lawyer. No longer would Whitney and Lincoln hitch up on hog and sheep cases in Urbana. They were getting metropolitan; they had graduated from the Eighth Circuit. Whitney had tickets to Rumsey and Newcomb's Minstrels, and queried, "Would you like to go to a nigger show tonight?” “Of all things I would rather do tonight that certainly is one," said the tickled Lincoln. “It's a high-toned troupe,” Whitney guaranteed. And they went, Lincoln to rollick and clap his hands. A new song was offered. "I wish I was in de land ob cotton, Old times dar am not forgotten, Look away, look away, Dixie Land." And Lincoln rollicked, "Let's have it again! Let's have it again!"

He went into court and explained to a jury the workings of different kinds of water wheels, to show that the water wheel of his client in the case of Parker vs. Hoyt was not an infringement on a patent. The jury had been out two hours; Lincoln was walking the street in sight of the windows of the room where the jury was locked in; Grant Goodrich, his associate counsel, came and told him one man on the jury had held up a finger toward them. This set Lincoln wondering whether the jury were eleven to one against him. He told Goodrich it might be like the case he had in Tazewell County where the jury was eleven to one against his client, a woman seeking a divorce. Eleven jurymen had signed a verdict favoring the husband. The twelfth man said: "Gentlemen, I am going to lie down and sleep, and when you get ready to give a verdict for that little woman, then wake me; for before I give a verdict against her, I will lie here till I rot and the pismires carry me out through the keyhole.” As it happened, the rights of the water wheel Lincoln argued for were upheld by the jury.

On Sunday mornings occasionally Lincoln would go to his office, take off his coat and stretch out on the sofa. "He would lie on his back and look up at the ceiling an hour or two, not saying a word," said Milt Hay. "What he was thinking about he didn't say. Sometimes after a long spell of silence he might say, 'Hay, did it ever strike you as peculiar?' and then go on with some thought he had been tracing, talking as he lay on his back looking at the ceiling. After a while he might get up and look around in some books or papers or write a letter or two. Then he'd put on his coat and hat and walk home in time for dinner."

ONCE when Lincoln's wife came to see him in his office, he was puzzled about the business in hand, and as his face took on an absent look Mrs. Lincoln said, "Mr. Lincoln, you look like you were having your picture taken."

He had a face he could manipulate, with take-off and put-on of look and tone, shadings in a gamut of the comedy of life. He was a practiced actor and an individual artist in the use of his face, when the going was good, and the time and company proper.

Lincoln had often sat before a camera while a photographer stood with watch in hand counting the minutes till the "sitter" would be told, “All right, it's over." In front of the sitter was the black box with the negative plate taking a sun-print of his face, while behind him was an iron rack that his head fitted against while he kept his face muscles quiet, or stiff, till enough minutes had been counted off. Later, when proofs were brought to him, Lincoln left it to others to pick out the ones for final prints. Also it was others who urged him to have his pictures taken. He had greeted crowds, remarking that while they were looking into his face and he into theirs, he had "the advantage.”

In his book of "Joe Miller's Jests" was an anecdote of two Frenchmen who were going to fight a duel. And one had stared long at the face of his enemy and said, “I can't fight with you," apologized, begged a thousand pardons, and explained, "If we fight I shall kill you and then I will remain the ugliest fellow in the kingdom." It was a story much like Lincoln's of his meeting with a man who handed him a pistol, saying, “I promised long ago that if I ever met a man uglier than myself I would hand him this pistol and tell him to shoot me." And Lincoln had answered, after searching the fellow's face, "Well, if I am uglier than you are, for God's sake, go ahead and shoot." Thus the story was told.

Perhaps such stories flitted through his mind as he sat one day before a mirror in a room in the Borland Block in Chicago, with plaster over all of his face except the eyes. He was breathing through quills stuck through the plaster and into his nose. It was part of what he had to go through for the sculptor Leonard Volk, who wanted to make a bust of him. Every morning after breakfast for several days he went to Volk's studio. As he came in on a Sunday morning, he remarked to Volk that a friend at the Tremont House had asked him to go to church but he preferred sitting for the bust. And as Volk told it afterward, Lincoln explained: “The fact is, I don't like to hear cut-and-dried sermons. When I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees."

Volk one day took a collection of photographs he had made in Rome and Florence, and tried to interest Lincoln in Roman art, in the way that

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he, Volk, was interested. And as Volk later told it: "I held the photographs and explained them to him, but I noticed a growing weariness, and his eyelids closed occasionally as if he were sleepy, or were thinking of something besides Grecian and Roman statuary and architecture. Finally he said: "These things must be very interesting to you, Mr. Volk; but the truth is I don't know much of history, and all I do know of it I have learned from law books." "

As he posed, Lincoln rambled along through story after story, keeping away from politics and religion, and remarking once, "I am bored nearly every time I sit down to a public dining table by some one pitching into me on politics."

Volk finished the head, and at the final sitting had Lincoln strip off his clothes so as to show the bare shoulders and breast. Lincoln unbuttoned his undershirt, pulled it down the required distance, tied the sleeves behind him, and stood posing for an hour. The sitting came to an end. Volk offered to help him dress, Lincoln replying, "No, I can do it better alone." Volk went on working and Lincoln left in a hurry, after a warm handshake and, "Good-by, I will see you again soon."

Volk heard Lincoln's boots on the stairway, going down. Then the stairway was quiet a few moments. And again the sound of Lincoln's boots were on the stairs. He was coming at a fast pace. He came into the studio in a hurry, saying, "I got down on the sidewalk and found I had forgotten to put on my undershirt, and thought it wouldn't do to go through the streets this way."

The sleeves that he had tied behind his back had bulged out or come loose. He had forgotten to put his arms into his undershirt sleeves. Volk helped him undress and redress while they both laughed.

CHAPTER 136

THE Civilization of the United States ran in elusive outlines in the months when Davis, Fell, Swett, Dubois, Herndon, Medill, and Ray were running their dark horse, Abraham Lincoln, in the race for a presidential nomination in 1860.

Lincoln murmured to Whitney one day: "Judd and Ray and those fellows think I don't see anything, but I see all around them; I see better what they want to do than they do themselves."

Lincoln had a way of slipping through a door into a roomful of men so that he was there and had seen them before they saw him. His feet, though large, had cat-sinews; he was swift and sure in movements at certain moments; when aroused there was a panther subtlety about him.

Lincoln wrote to an Ohio delegate, of the coming national Republican convention in Chicago, that Seward "is the very best candidate we could