He

The answer would be that he need not see the women to have them howl about him, but here he held to a distinct policy of seeing everyone who came. did not want to be out of touch with the " plain people." He was their representative; he could not reach them through the officials and the heads of departments in Washington. "I will try to see you as I see everyone else," he wrote to strangers asking for interviews. For the first two years in the White House he could not pass from his room to the executive room without crossing a corridor crowded with visitors, each with his own little burden, anxious to get a word with him. Later he had a door cut which led directly into his reception room, but the corridor was still crowded. "Who is that woman crying in the hall; what is the matter with her?" he asked one day while in the telegraph office, and dropped the work in hand to attend to her case.

The personality of the man overflowed everywhere; even the usually unbending telegraph dispatches bear marks of it. There is a telegram to a Major-General asking if he should give a pass to a man who wanted to follow the army to pick up rags and cast-off clothing, and another to Grant, asking if he should give a pass to a Dr W." who wishes to introduce Harmon's Sandal Sock' into the army." To his wife he telegraphed: "Tell Tad the goats and father are very well, especially the goats." Again in his daily telegrams to his wife that he was well he adds, "including Tad's pony and the goats."

Two letters to the actor, James H. Hackett, throw a sidelight on the sensibilities of the man. They

contain so much gentleness and modesty almost as if he were not sure of himself:

"MY DEAR SIR,-Months ago I should have acknowledged the receipt of your book and accompanying kind note; and I now have to beg your pardon for not having done so.

"For one of my age I have seen very little of the drama. The first presentation of Falstaff I ever saw was yours here, last winter or spring. Perhaps the best compliment I can pay is to say, as I truly can, I am very anxious to see it again. Some of Shakespeare's plays I have never read, while others I have gone over perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader. Among the latter are Lear, Richard III., Henry VIII., Hamlet, and especially Macbeth. think nothing equals Macbeth. It is wonderful.

I

"Unlike you gentlemen of the profession, I think the soliloquy in Hamlet commencing' Oh, my offence is rank,' surpasses that commencing To be, or not to be.' But pardon this small attempt at criticism. I should like to hear you pronounce the opening speech of Richard III. Will you not soon visit Washington again? If you do, please call and let me make your personal acquaintance."

Hackett printed this letter, which caused a response that was temperamental and came from the heart:

My note to you I certainly did not expect to see in print; yet I have not been much shocked by the newspaper comments upon it. Those comments constitute a fair specimen of what has occurred to me through life. I have endured a great deal of ridicule without much malice; and have received a great deal of kindness, not quite free from ridicule. I am used to it."

And here again the telegraph files disclose his many-mooded nature. In the midst of military dispatches we find one to his wife, who was away

visiting: "Think you had better put Tad's pistol away; I had an ugly dream about him."

There is little wonder that dreams were ugly those days. Washington was the clearing centre of the wounded from the armies of the Potomac and the Middle West. Soon after Bull Run they were brought in on stretchers and ambulance waggons and cattlecars, and placed upon the wharves until suitable accommodation was found. Almost every public building -museums, schools, churches - was converted into hospitals. Private homes were used. The wounded were never out of Lincoln's mind. He visited them in their wards, he addressed fairs to bring in money to aid in their comfort. He was the prime mover in building the Armory Square Hospital, which became the largest and best-organized hospital during the Civil War. He sent the seeds from the Agricultural Department which converted the grounds around it into a bower of blossoms. He became intimately connected with the wounded veterans, trying indeed to be the "Father Abraham "the soldiers called him.

And this man, going through new crises with each new day, opened Cabinet meetings by reading Petroleum V. Nasby's Letters, or Recollections of A. Ward, Showman, or went wandering through his rooms repeating in a sing-song voice: "Mortal man with feet of clay, here to-morrow, gone to-day." After his death two worn and well-thumbed copies were found of the Nasby Letters and the Book of Copperheads, both satires on the party in the North which sympathized with the South. He carried these books with him in his pocket, or they lay near at hand on his work-table, among documents