a habit of going among the people in the halls and waiting room and learning their wants. Now and then when they touched his pity or appealed to his sense of justice, he promptly led them into the presence of the President.

In the evening, it was Tad's custom to go to his father and make a report of all he had seen and done since morning. As a rule he fell asleep in the midst of his prattle, and then Lincoln turned again to his labors, his boy lying on the floor beside his desk. When the President's own long day was done, he took the sleeping child on his shoulder and carried him to bed.

LINCOLN AND HIS SOLDIERS

Indifferent to the pomp and glory of war, this commander of a million men in arms held himself no more than the equal of the least among them. - His deference to the men in the ranks and their love for Father Abraham. — Visiting the sick and wounded. — His interview with a blind soldier. — Heeding a baby's appeal. His beautiful tribute to a bereaved mother. Looking into the camp kettle. — His courage in the face of the enemy.- "There are already too many weeping widows."-His hatred of Fridays. A friend of the coward. "Leg cases." Pity for a condemned slave-trader. — Lincoln and the sleeping sentinel. The boy who paid the President's bill.

"O, slow to smite and swift to spare,

Gentle and merciful and just!

Who, in the fear of God, didst bear
The sword of power

a nation's trust!"

- WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT.

LINCOLN'S life was filled with striking contrasts. For this careless captain of a company of unruly rustics in the Black Hawk War to become the Commander-in-chief of a million soldiers, a mightier force of warriors than any conquering monarch of modern times ever assembled, was perhaps the strangest fortune that befell him. In four years he called to his command two and a half millions of men, probably a greater number than followed the

eagles of Napoleon in all his twenty years of campaigning from Arcola to Waterloo.

Yet this unparalleled martial power never touched the ambition of Lincoln. He cared nothing for the pomp of arms, the pride of rank, or the glory of war. This man who could say to ten hundred thousand armed troops, go, and they would go, come, and they would come, held himself to be no more than the equal of the least among them. While he stood toward all as a comrade rather than a commander, they looked up to him in perfect trust, and delighted to hail him as Father Abraham.

It was enough for him to touch his hat to a general, but he liked to bare his head to the boys in the ranks. He himself created generals by the hundreds, but in his eyes the private soldier was the handiwork of the Almighty. The reported capture of an officer and twelve army mules in a raid near Washington only moved him to remark, "How unfortunate! I can fill that brigadier's place in five minutes, but those mules cost us two hundred dollars apiece." He never to the end solved the mystery of the uniforms, and could not tell a general from a colonel by his epaulettes.

If he passed the White House guard twenty times a day, he always saluted its members. He knew by name every man in the company which watched

over him in his rest at the Soldiers' Home, and was the real friend of all, heartily enjoying an occasional cup of coffee at their mess and the little jokes they played on one another. If any were missing, he noticed their absence, and if they were sick, he never forgot to ask about them.

The many military hospitals, crowded with human suffering, that sprang up in Washington, were his special care. He visited and cheered the wounded, pausing beside their cots of pain, bending upon them his pitying gaze and laying his great hand tenderly on their fevered brows. He remembered and watched those who were in peril of death, and eagerly welcomed any signs of improvement in their condition, while he joked with those who were well enough to take a joke.

Once as he drove up to a hospital, Lincoln saw one of the inmates walking directly in front of his team, and he cried out to the driver to stop. The horses were checked none too soon to avoid running the man down. Then Lincoln saw that the poor fellow, only a boy, had been shot in both eyes. He got out of his carriage and, taking the blind soldier by the hand, asked him in quavering tones for his name, his service, and his residence. "I am Abraham Lincoln," he himself said, as he was leaving, and the sightless face of the youth was lit

up with gratitude as he listened to the President's words of honest sympathy.

The next day the chief of the hospital laid in the boy's hands a commission as first lieutenant in the army of the United States, bearing the President's signature, and with it an order retiring him on threefourths pay for all the years of helplessness that, until then, had stretched before him through a hopeless future.

The sympathy of most men who get to be presidents, governors, or statesmen can be reached only through their heads. It becomes a thing of the mind, filtered and cooled by an intellectual process. Lincoln's sympathies always remained where nature herself placed them, in the heart, and thence they freely flowed, unhindered by reflection and calculation. Kindness with him was an impulse and not a duty. His benevolence was far from scientific, yet he was so shrewd a judge of human nature that he seldom was cheated.

The stone walls of the White House no more shut him in from his fellows, from the hopes and sorrows, the poverty and the pride of the plain people, than did the unhewn logs behind which he shivered and hungered in his boyhood home. A mother's tears, a baby's cry, a father's plea, an empty sleeve, or a crutch never failed to move him.