have never seen a man who could perform this feat. Any man who will attempt to do it will see how difficult it is. He once said to me: "When I was eighteen years of age I could do this, and I have never seen the day since that I could not do it." He used to take great satisfaction in performing this feat before the strong sailors, and smile at their unsuccessful efforts to imitate it.

With Mr. Lincoln's great physical strength the labor of splitting rails was a mere amusement. It was not work; it was a kind of outlet for his surplus energy. Members of athletic associations devote a large portion of their time and spend considerable money simply for the purpose of keeping their muscles in shape. In the same way with Lincoln, rail-splitting was never gross labor to him, though it would have been to an ordinary man. He regarded it as little more than pastime to keep his muscles in play.

When I was Military Governor of Norfolk, Lincoln wrote his famous Proclamation of Emancipation. In that Proclamation he omitted all the loyal States, and all portions of other States that were occupied by United States troops and not under the dominion of the rebels.

On the first of January, the day set for the Proclamation to go into effect, I received a procession of five thousand Negroes in Norfolk who came to my home to wish me a happy New Year, and congratulate themselves on the fact that they had the rights of freedom. I did not dare tell them that the Proclamation did not apply to them, but I went to Washington and talked the matter over with Secretary Chase. He advised me to see the President, and, for fear the President might be engaged in some way, he asked me to take a note to him, and he

would then see me at once. So I went over and saw him and told him of my experience with the five thousand Negroes. He said: "This is the difficulty; we want to keep all that we have of the border States — those that have not seceded and the portions of those which we have occupied. And, in order to do that, it is necessary to omit those areas I have mentioned from the effect of this Proclamation." The idea was to keep the border States where the War was going on for fear we might excite them by the thought of losing slavery, as we had not come to that issue yet.

Subsequently, I had occasion to complain to the President of what I thought was the injurious action of one of the Governors of the loyal States where I had a command. "Well, now," said Mr. Lincoln; "you remember what I told you about the border States. The same thing

applies to the Governors of the loyal States. We cannot afford to quarrel with them about collateral issues. We want their soldiers."

One day I went to see Lincoln. He was being shaved. The Negro barber had just covered him with an immense coat of lather. He had sent word for me to come right in. He said: "I hope I don't scare you; I look frightful enough by nature without the addition of this lather."

On another occasion, sitting before his desk in his office, he quaintly remarked: "I wish George Washington or some of those old patriots were here in my place so that I could have a little rest."

NEW YORK CITY.

LINCOLN - AFTER THIRTY YEARS.

BY THEODORE L. CUYLER, D.D.

"WHEN I have had to address a fagged and listless audience, I have found that nothing was so certain to arouse them as to introduce the name of Abraham Lincoln." So remarked Dr. Newman Hall, of London, to me last year; and I have had a similar experience with American audiences. No other name has such electric power on every true heart from Maine to Mexico. If Washington is the most revered, Lincoln is the best-loved man that ever trod this continent.

The thirtieth anniversary of his martyrdom stirs afresh the fount of memory and of tears in my own heart. On that fatal fourteenth of April, 1865, I was present at the glorious restoration of the old flag in Fort Sumter; and, after the halyard had passed through the hands of General Anderson, I was glad to get hold of it, in company with William Lloyd Garrison, George Thompson, of England, and several others, and help pull "Old Glory" up to the flagstaff peak. The next morning I addressed a thousand Negro children; and when I said to them, "Shall we invite your Father Abraham to come to Charleston and see the little folks he has made free?" a thousand black hands flew up with a shout. At that very moment the great, deep, melancholy eyes were sealed in death amid the weeping crowds

at Washington! At Fortress Monroe, on our homeward voyage, the terrible tidings pierced us like a dagger. On the wharf near the Fortress poor Negro women had hung bits of coarse black muslin around their little huckster tables. One of the women said to me: "Yes, sah; Father Linkum's dead. They killed our best friend; but God be libin' yet. Dey can't kill him; I'se sure of dat." Her simple, childlike faith reached up to grasp the Everlasting Arm which had led Lincoln while leading her and her race out of the house of bondage.

Thirty years the average term of one generation have rolled away since that coffin, drenched with a nation's tears, was borne by the mightiest of modern funeral processions from Washington to Springfield. During that time many a famous reputation has waned, or has utterly disappeared; but Lincoln's looms larger every day. Since the time when a Corsican lieutenant of artillery presided over a congress of conquered kings at Tilsit, history has recorded no such startling elevation from obscurity. Napoleon's head grew dizzy; but Lincoln's grew more serene and clear and majestically poised the higher he rose. Let our American boys study and grave on their hearts the dozen or two lines that record the wonderful story. Here it is: Born in one of the rudest log cabins of Kentucky on the twelfth of February, 1809; his poverty-stricken boyhood spent in clearing away forests, and only one year spent in the rudimentary studies of a rustic school; at the age of nineteen a hired deckhand on a Mississippi flatboat; then a clerk in a country store in Illinois; next a student of law from a few books borrowed and studied by firelight; in 1834 a member of the State Legislature; in 1846 in Congress introducing a bill to abolish slavery in

the District of Columbia; in 1858 waging the most protracted and brilliant debate with Douglas that our politics has ever known; in 1860 borne triumphantly into the Presidential chair by a popular voice "like the sound of many waters"; after four tempestuous years, and in the hour of victory, translated by a bloody martyrdom to his crown of glory, with four millions of broken fetters in his good right hand! What story is like unto that story? Thirty years have written and rewritten it in hundreds of forms, and it is not exhausted yet.

By this time we are all agreed that his lowly birth and early hardships were blessings in disguise; for one, I am thankful that he never rubbed his homespun back against the walls of a college. The "plain people," as he called them, were his university; the Bible and John Bunyan his earliest text-books. He felt the great throb of the "plain people's" hearts every hour that he was in the White House, and, next to God's leadings, they were his unerring guide. His plebeian simplicity of dress and manners, and his many humorous stories exposed him to the charge of clownishness and buffoonery; even Chief Justice Chase once aroused my ire by this unjust insinuation. His innumerable jests contained more wisdom than many a philosophic oration, and underneath his rustic manners this great child of nature possessed the most delicate instincts of the perfect gentleman. Lincoln often wore the saddest human face I ever saw; his occasional jokes were the safety valve to relieve his great, broken heart-broken by the nation's ceaseless agonies.

To what intellectual niche has the impartial verdict of thirty years assigned Abraham Lincoln? The only just scale by which to measure any man is the scale of actual achievement; and in Lincoln's case some of the tools