GOING TO WASHINGTON

Lincoln's eloquent farewell to his Springfield neighbors, February II, 1861. - "Not knowing when or whether ever I may return." His journey eastward. His greeting to a little girl, at whose suggestion he had grown a beard. · Caricatured as a sot. Coldly received in New York. - Pleading for the threatened Union. His solemn pledge at Independence Hall on Washington's birthday. - Warned of a plot to murder him as he passed through Baltimore.-Stealing into Washington in the night. His unexpected arrival at the capital at dawn, February 23.

LINCOLN, standing on the rear platform of his special car in the train that was about to bear him. away to Washington, lifted his hand as a signal for silence. He stood there, a solemn figure, and a spell fell upon the neighbors who had gathered at the Springfield station on a chill and dreary February morning to bid him farewell.

He had removed his hat and they, too, bared their heads to the falling snowflakes. While he gazed at them in silence for several seconds, his lip quivered with grief and there was a tear on his cheek. When at last he had summoned the strength to speak, his husky tone added to the impressiveness of the few sad words he chose for the leave-taking:

"My friends, no one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything. Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born, and one is buried.

"I now leave, not knowing when or whether ever I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance, I cannot fail.

"Trusting in Him, who can go with me, and remain with you, and be everywhere for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell."

The train pulled away, followed by the brimming eyes of the people, and, until it had disappeared from their view, they could see Lincoln, still standing on the platform of his car, looking at the little town where fame had sought him out.

In his young manhood he had walked its streets, a barefoot law student. In one of its halls he had

sounded the warning that a house divided against

itself cannot stand, and now his was the chosen hand to avert the national calamity which he then foretold. Within its limits was the only home that stood between the log-cabins of his early days and the White House toward which he was speeding. On the morrow he would reach his fifty-second birthday.

If, as he said, the task laid upon him was greater than that which fell to Washington, with equal truth he said at another time in the course of his journey, "I hold myself, without mock modesty, the humblest of all the individuals who have been elected President of the United States." No other President, probably no chief of state anywhere in the civilized world, has risen from the social depths in which Lincoln's fortunes were cast by the lottery of birth. No other man clothed with rule has embodied so completely the innumerable race of common men.

Furthermore, no other President had ever been elected with so little known in his favor, with so slight a prestige. The country was a stranger even to his name five years before. He really had been on the national stage less than three years. The only executive place he ever had held was the post-office of New Salem, which he "carried in his hat." Since the day when the people were

surprised by the news of his nomination for President, he had not made a single appearance outside of Springfield, and had not addressed in all more than three or four hundred words to the public. Naturally the people now watched him with narroweyed curiosity as he emerged before them.

His tour lasted nearly two weeks, and included stops in the principal cities on the way to Washington. All the simple, homely ways of the man were caught up and magnified or distorted, for men were unused to seeing such a figure as his standing on the heights of greatness.

A little girl had written him, begging him to grow a beard, because she thought it would improve his appearance. When he came to the town in New York where she lived, he called for her, and said as he kissed her, "You see, Grace, I have let these whiskers grow for you." The incident was ridiculed in the press, and one paper carried its report of the day under the flippant heading, "Old Abe kissed by a pretty girl."

The unusual blend of humor and earnestness in Lincoln's composition was new to the nation at large, and the cartoonist of the principal illustrated paper, having read in the daily press that Lincoln kept those around him on his travels in a continual roar, pictured this life-long foe of intemperance

as a sot with a whiskey glass in his hand, raising a laugh among some drunken loafers who surrounded him, while near by stood a hearse bearing the corpse of the Union.

The city of New York received him with cold disdain. Wall Street was charging the tottering government ten and twelve per cent interest; the Broadway crowds were silent if not sullen when he passed. At the opera, where he appeared in black gloves, an amused smile ran round the boxes.

The hearts of the plain people, however, responded to the one clear note which he sounded in all his addresses. Everywhere he pleaded for the threatened Union, not as a political dogma, nor yet as a commercial asset, but as the fairest hope that earth held for the masses of mankind. Peace was in his mind always, but he aroused much enthusiasm in the Assembly of New Jersey, when with a good deal of vigor he said, "It may be necessary to put the foot down firmly."

The climax of his appeals to patriotism was appropriately reached when he spoke in Independence Hall at Philadelphia, on Washington's birthday. "I have never had a feeling politically," he declared, "that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence," which he held up as the ideal of an equal chance for