thought his relations with Mary made it is his duty to stand in her place, to shield her.

When Speed was in abject misery about the uncertainty of his affection for the woman he was going to marry, and yet was frantic over the idea of her death, Lincoln had argued that Speed's anxiety for her recovery and health utterly contradicted the suspicion that he did not love her. And now, who will say that his own assumption of responsibility for Mary Todd's misdoings, and all this fuss about a duel with General Shields, did not point to his affection for her, and desire to be responsible for her? If he had felt that she was destined to be such a burden to him, and that marriage with her was so repugnant to him, was this not an excellent occasion to relieve himself of all these troubles? Could he not have chosen rifles, and put an end to his struggles by giving Shields an opportunity to kill him? He evidently feared death more than he did marriage. He had no notion of dying then, nor in any such a way. He and Miss Todd had the same object in view. They both believed in his ultimate success and "greatness;" she even more firmly than he. They were mainly congenial, and especially united on the great purpose; and if it can not be shown that she really made him President, is it, after all, so clear that he was more useful to her than she was to him? The real test of marriage is in this very word, useful. The highest marriage is doubtless that, in which the partners attain the highest degree of usefulness, working from kindred and genial motives. And the

highest possible affection one person can display for another, is in leading him to be the highest and best he possibly can be; in being useful to him in the ways that will make him the most successful, the most intellectual, the most refined, the most virtuous, and the most beneficial in this life with a view to another.

CHAPTER XXIX.

MR. LINCOLN AT HOME AND AMONG HIS BOOKS-THE LINCOLNS IN THE WHITE HOUSE-THE MISTRESS.

MR..

R. LINCOLN now settled down with more earnestness than he had ever felt to the work of life. His letters to friends soon changed in tone. Not six months after his marriage he wrote to Speed with great vivacity and good humor as to the uncertainty yet of his having a namesake soon at Springfield. In a letter to Speed in 1846 he wrote:

"We have another boy, born the 10th of March. He is very much such a child as Bob was at his age, rather of a longer order. Bob is short and low, and I expect always will be. He talks very plainly, almost as plainly as anybody. He is quite smart enough. I sometimes fear that he is one of the little rare-ripe sort, that are smarter at about five than ever after. He has a great deal of that sort of mischief that is the offspring of much animal spirits. Since I began this letter, a messenger came to tell me Bob was lost; but by the time I reached the house his mother had found him, and had him whipped; and by now, very likely he is run away again. Mary has read your letter, and wishes to be remembered to Mrs. S. and you, in which I most sincerely join."

Mrs. Lincoln did not accompany her husband to Washington during his service in Congress, but remained at home in care of her children. But no

other person in the world watched his course with such deep concern as she did. Nor was the judgment of any other, not excepting the discerning politicians, so reliable as to what his course should be. When he had established the reputation of "Honest Old Abe" nothing was so important to him as to keep this reputation. It was a distinction which appealed to the feelings of the masses; and nobody liked it better than Mrs. Lincoln, and would have done so much to aid him in preserving it, both for its own sake and for the stock of political capital there was in it. When Mr. Lincoln could have been appointed Governor of Oregon, in 1852, and sent beyond the line where Presidents may be born or live, she interposed her veto, on the best of grounds. And here her judgment was opposed to that of her husband and all his other friends. They thought it was a long stride in the way he wanted to go. She believed it was the road away from the Presidency, if not to oblivion. And she was right. When Mr. Lincoln was officiously announced in 1846 as a candidate for the Legislature, during his absence from Springfield, she went to the newspaper office and had the announcement taken from the paper. She did not think his reputation would gain anything by this step, and here for the first time her judgment was better than that of Mr. Lincoln and his wise political friends. When her husband was at last, or so soon, nominated for the Presidency, all her four children had been born, and one of them was "dead." When Mr. Lincoln himself heard of the nomination his first

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desire was to tell it to her. She was equally concerned with him in it. She had kept his eye and conduct turned toward this event now consummated, with what good fortune as to the final result, she never doubted. When admirers, flatterers, sightseers, office-seekers, and friends began to roll in upon him, she was found equal to the emergency. She had thought and dreamed of its possibility, and was not unprepared to do her part. And both herself and her children gained the favorable opinion of those who viewed them in the light of the family of the future President. Mrs. Lincoln's bad temper was, perhaps, her greatest misfortune. And if she ever tried to improve and regulate it, her success was hardly noteworthy. Like many another foolish. woman, one of her faults was in standing in the way of her husband in the correction of wrong steps in their children. And here she undertook to do with her tongue, in the presence of the children, what she was not likely to accomplish in any other way. She claimed for herself the prerogative of whipping or pampering the children as her whim or temper ran; but she considered Mr. Lincoln's disciplinary proceedings often very inopportune, and met them by tonguelashing. Indeed this unfortunate temper made Mrs. Lincoln, at times, a regular Xanthippe. But Lincoln soon became master of himself, and his good sense and good-humor were never known to forsake him. Amidst her passion-storms no unkind words ever escaped him. He knew what her wretched temper meant, and waited for the sunshine which he well