At eight o'clock in the evening of Tuesday, May second, the train left Chicago, and on the following morning reached Springfield. All the preceding day the roads leading to that city had been bringing in loads of visitors. By the time the funeral train arrived it seemed as if there was hardly standing room for the population and those who had come to be present on that sad occasion. Among those who returned with his remains were three of the men who had gone out with him on his journey to Washington, Colonel Ward H. Lamon, Judge David Davis and Major-General David Hunter. Among his pall-bearers were old-time neighbors, including his sometime partner, Honorable Stephen T. Logan, and Honorable S. H. Treat, the judge in whose court he had so often appeared.

All that day and on the following morning the body of Lincoln lay in state in the old state-house. At ten o'clock, on Thursday, May fourth, the coffin was closed and conveyed to the hearse, and the funeral procession formed at the north gate of the court-house square, and moved to Oak Ridge Cemetery one and a half miles distant.

Prayer was offered by the Reverend Albert Hale, and the scripture was read by the Reverend N. W. Minor, local pastors. Then was read the greatest of all Lincoln's state papers, his second inaugural.

The funeral oration was delivered by Bishop Simpson of the Methodist Church, a worthy tribute to a great man.

The closing prayer was offered by the Reverend Doctor Gurley, Lincoln's pastor, and so closed that memorable day. Never in the history of America has there been another funeral like that.

As the body of Lincoln returned to the soil of his own state, Edna Dean Proctor, then a young woman, wrote a noble poem, a copy of which in her own handwriting hangs in the tomb of Lincoln, and from which a few lines may be quoted:

Now must the storied Potomac
Honors forever divide;
Now to the Sangamon fameless
Give of its century's pride;

Sangamon, stream of the prairies,
Placidly westward that flows,
Far in whose city of silence

Calm he has sought his repose.

Not for thy sheaves nor savannas
Crown we thee, proud Illinois!
Here in his grave is thy grandeur,
Born of his sorrow thy joy.
Only the tomb by Mount Zion

Hewn for the Lord do we hold
Dearer than his in thy prairies,
Girdled with harvests of gold.

No description can adequately convey the impression which Lincoln's homeward journey made upon the nation and the world. There was so much to remind one of his tour away from Springfield toward Washington. The two were so like, yet so sadly different. All attempts at description fail. Perhaps no writer has more truthfully caught the spirit of that journey than Walt Whitman. The lilacs were in bloom as the funeral train moved westward, and Whitman has forever associated their annual efflorescense with memories of the last journey of Abraham Lincoln:

When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom'd,

And the great star early drooped in the western sky in the night,
I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever returning spring.

O ever-returning spring! trinity sure to me you bring;
Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.

Over the breast of the spring, the land amid cities,

Amid lanes, and through old woods (where lately the violets peeped from the ground, spotting the gray debris ;) Amid the grass in the fields each side of the lines-passing the endless grass;

Passing the yellow-speared wheat, every grain from its shroud in the dark-brown fields uprising;

Passing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchards;
Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave,
Night and day journeys a coffin.

Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,

Through day and night, with the great cloud darkening the land, With the pomp of the inlooped flags, with the cities draped in

black,

With the show of the States themselves, as of crape-veiled women, standing,

With processions long and winding, and the flambeaus of the

night,

With the countless torches lit-with the silent sea of faces, and the unbared heads,

With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the somber faces, With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn;

With all the mournful voices of the dirges, poured around the coffin,

The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organ-Where amid these you journey,

With the tolling, tolling bells' perpetual clang;

Here! coffin that slowly passes,

I give you my sprig of lilac!