trast to the turbulent passions which disturbed the men who gathered about the bier. Seward, who had been stabbed while in bed by one of the conspirators and narrowly escaped death, was not told of Booth's crime. He could only wonder why his kind and thoughtful chief did not call, for he felt he would be the first to visit him in his affliction. On Sunday, when he caught a glimpse from where he lay of a flag at half staff, the meaning of it flashed on his mind. The funeral was held in the White House on Wednesday, and all the people of the North reverently kept the day. Not a kinsman of the lonely man was among the mourners, but races and sects were knit together in a kinship of sorrow for this brother of man. Queen Victoria sent her condolences to Mrs. Lincoln, "as from a widow to a widow." More than kingly honors were paid the mortal remains of one who entered the world through a hovel of logs. He was borne to the Capitol, where many thought his appropriate sepulture was in the crypt built for the bones of Washington, his only peer in American history. Illinois, however, claimed his dust, as the rightful heritage of her soil. The prairies must be hallowed by the grave of the first great man to be nurtured by them. Cities and states begged the privilege of honoring his body on its way to the grave. Arrangements were made for the cortège to pass over nearly the same route which Lincoln had followed on his way to the capital four years before. At Philadelphia, Liberty Bell was placed at the head of his coffin in Independence Hall, where, in 1861, he had solemnly declared he would rather be assassinated then and there than surrender the Union. Hundreds of thousands looked upon his face in New York. A multitude of people from all over the upper part of the Empire State gathered at Albany, and were in waiting at midnight when the body was placed in the Capitol. At every little station the people gathered and stood with bared heads as the funeral train swept by. Arches were erected over the track of the railroad. Bonfires lit the way by night. The people of the West assembled in Chicago, to bend in reverence above the bier of the first President they had given to the nation. Springfield, proud in her grief, welcomed home the familiar form of her immortal citizen. It was carried in honor to the hall of the House of Representatives, where the now silent lips had aroused a people to battle for freedom. There it lay, surrounded by the scenes and friends of his early struggles. His loving stepmother lived to mourn the wilderness waif, whom she had reared for his wonderful destiny, but she was too feeble from age to attend his funeral. The news of his assassination did not surprise her, for she had dreaded it every day since he left her to enter upon his duties at Washington. His sign still swung in front of the old law office, and from the country about New Salem and Clary's Grove simple men and women brought their tribute of tears, not to the dead President, but to the good neighbor, who had helped them in the field, in the forest, or on the highway, and with whom they had shared the crust of poverty. Long before the world knew him and enrolled him among the great, they knew him and honored him. In the imposing procession to the tomb, "Old Bob," the horse that had carried him on his travels around the circuit, walked behind the funeral car of his dead master. The prairie was in its Maytime bloom, when Lincoln was laid to rest on its bosom, beside his Willie and the other little boy who had died in early childhood, where Tad soon joined him, and where, after seventeen years of weary waiting, the distracted wife and mother found the peace for which she yearned. Above his grave, a lofty monument was reared by his countrymen, and thousands of black men, from whose ankles he had struck the shackles of slavery, contributed for its erection out of the earnings of their free labor. |