nity, motioned the offender through the opened door. And at another time, when one of his dearest friends had been maligned in a memorial laid before him, he asked if the paper were his to treat as he pleased, and answered affirmatively, he calmly laid the document on the burning coals in the grate and bade the delegates goodmorning.

The folk-lore, the multitudinous stories ab

sorbed in the years of his roving frontier life, were of inestimable value to Lincoln; and these are popularly associated in any view of his life and character. But he seldom told a story for the mere sake of telling it. Invariably, the anecdote, the incident, the humorsome jest had pith and point. Taken from the setting that Lincoln gave it, it was merely funny; as he gave it, it was the barbed arrow that sent the argument or saying home. This has been excellently de

scribed by Emerson, who, in his funeral address at Concord, said: "He is the author of a multitude of good sayings, so disguised as pleasantries that it is certain that they had no reputation at first but as jests; and only later, by the very acceptance and adoption they find in the mouths of millions, turn out to be the wisdom of the hour. I am sure if this man had ruled in a period of less facility of printing, he would have become mythological in a very few years, like Æsop or Pilpay, or one of the Seven Wise Masters, by his fables and proverbs."

Whatever were his limitations, and these were apparent to those who knew him, Lincoln was fully equal to the time in which he lived and to the vast burden that he. lifted and carried with giant ease and strength. The tragicalness, the needlessness, so to speak, of his taking-off will always remain to mortal eyes inexplicable. Why he should not have been permitted to live and enjoy the well-earned fruits of four years of strenuous labor, why he should have been allowed only to look over into the Promised Land of Peace from the Pisgah summit of those last sad days, we may not know. Somewhere in God's eternal plan that noble, self-denying soul lives and rejoices in its strength. And even we, disconsolately lamenting his unrewarded years of toil, may find some consolation in the thought that in the vast movements of humanity in which nations and individuals are insignificant factors, the life of Lincoln was long enough to serve its majestic mission.

VIII.

CHARLES SUMNER.

IN October, 1850, Charles Sumner delivered a wonderful speech in Faneuil Hall, Boston. This was at the important turning-point in the history of American politics when old parties were dissolving, and from their elements were rising the two great parties (for there were really only two) that were to stand arrayed against each other until the civil war should destroy slavery and open another epoch in the history of civilization. It was my good fortune to sit within a few feet of the rostrum, at a reporters' table, looking up at the young Apollo, who towered like a demigod at an immense height over us. remember one reporter, who, fascinated by the sight, looked up and breathlessly said: "Great God! that man seems twenty feet high!"

His personal appearance was not only one of extreme elegance-for he was always dressed with scrupulous care-but of magnificent and manly proportions. He was six feet and two inches high, well formed, with a magnificent head of hair, dark, lustrous eyes, perfect teeth, and features that might be called Romanesque. His gestures were large and sweeping, his voice resonant and musical, but without any such great