some days on parched corn exclusively, and that he would have to ask me for rations and forage. I told him . . . to send . . . to Appomattox where he could have . . . all the provisions wanted.

In Lee's Memoirs we read:

378

When, after his interview with Grant, General Lee again appeared, a shout of welcome instinctively ran through the army. But instantly recollecting the sad occasion that brought him before them, their shouts sank into silence, every hat was raised, and the bronzed faces of the thousands of grim warriors were bathed with tears.

As he rode slowly along the lines hundreds of his devoted veterans pressed around the noble chief, trying to take his hand, touch his person, or even lay a hand upon his horse. . . . The general then, with head bare and tears flowing freely down his manly cheeks, bade adieu to the army. In a few words he told the brave men who had been so true in arms to return to their homes and become worthy citizens.379

STUDY ON 16.

1. Take your Outline Map for the Civil War, and mark in blue the Union victories of 1865; mark in red Confederate victories. 2. What harm did Sheridan's raid do to Lee's army? 3. What made the Virginian campaigns of 1864 terrible? 4. Why could not Lee hold out longer? 5. What nobility did Grant show on the occasion of Lee's surrender? 6. What nobility did Lee show? 7. In what war had Grant and Lee both served before the time of the Civil War? 8. Why did the loss of Lee's army mean the ruin of the Confederacy? 9. How was it that Grant's army had more to eat than Lee's?

Supplementary Reading. Thomas Buchanan Read's poem of Sheridan's Ride. Fall of Richmond, in Harper's Monthly, XXXIII. 92. John Esten Cooke's Mohun; or, The Last Days of Lee and his Paladins. Richardson's The Field, Dungeon, and Escape.

17. ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

... Standing like a tower,

Our children shall behold his fame
The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man,
Sagacious, patient, dreading praise no blame,
New birth of our new soil, the first American.

-LowELL, in Commemoration Ode.

The Death of Lincoln. Throughout the war the friends of Lincoln had feared for his life, but he was unwilling to have any military guard. A few days after the surrender of Lee, while in the theatre, Lincoln was shot from behind by John Wilkes Booth, who with a band of conspirators had plotted this base deed, thinking thus to help the Confederacy. The whole country, South as well as North, lamented his death, and the land was filled with mourning.

Life of Lincoln. The life of Lincoln before becoming President was thus summed up by himself, in 1858:

Born, February 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Ky.

Education, defective.

Profession, Lawyer.

Have been a Captain of Volunteers in the Black Hawk War.
Postmaster at a very small Office.

Four times a Member of the Illinois Legislature, and was a Member of the Lower House of Congress.380

He described himself as belonging "to what they call down South the Scrubs," or poor whites. While he was still a boy, his father moved from Kentucky into Indiana, and thence into Illinois, where they built the house pictured on p. 226.

A man who used to work with Abraham occasionally during his first years in Illinois, says that at that time he was the roughest

looking person he ever saw. He was tall, angular and ungainly, and wore trousers made of flax and tow, cut tight at the ankle, and out at both knees. . . . He made a bargain with Mrs. Nancy Miller to split four hundred rails for every yard of brown jeans, dyed with white walnut bark, that would be necessary to make him a pair of trousers. In these days he used to walk five, six and seven miles to his work.& 381

After the Black Hawk War, Lincoln tried keeping a country store, but spent much of his time in studying law and surveying. At last he gave up the store altogether and began the practice of law. From this time his progress was quietly, steadily onward.

Stories and Words of Lincoln. - While a store-keeper in Illinois:

Just as he was closing the store for the night, a woman entered, and asked for half a pound of tea. The tea was weighed out and paid for, and the store was left for the night. The next morning, Abraham entered to begin the duties of the day, when he discovered a four ounce weight on the scales. He saw at once that he had made a mistake, and, shutting the store, he took a long walk before breakfast to deliver the remainder of the tea.

After his first election to the Illinois Legislature :

At the close of the canvass which resulted in his election, he walked to Springfield, borrowed "a load" of books, . . . and took them home with him.... He studied while he had bread, and then started out on a surveying tour, to win the money that would buy more. One who remembers his habits during this period says that he went, day after day, for weeks, and sat under an oak tree on a hill, and read. . . . When the time for the assembling the Legislature approached, Lincoln dropped his law books, shouldered his pack, and on foot, trudged to . . . the capital of the State, about a hundred miles, to make his entrance into public life.382