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Judge Kelly of Pennsylvania, one of the committee, and a very tall man, looked at Mr. Lincoln, up and down, before it came his turn to take his hand, a scrutiny that had not escaped Mr. Lincoln's quick eye. So, when he took the hand of the Judge, he inquired: "what is your hight?" "six feet three," replied the Judge. "What is yours, Mr. Lincoln?" "Six feet four," responded Mr. Lincoln. "Then, sir," said the Judge, "Pennsylvania bows to Illinois. My dear man," he continued, "for years my heart has been aching for a president that I could look up to; and I've found him at last, in the land where we thought there were none but little giants." The evening passed quickly away, and the committee retired with a very pleasant impression of the man in whose hands they had placed the standard of the party for a great and decisive campaign. Mr. Ashmun met the nominee as an old friend, with whom he had acted in Congress, when both were members of the old whig party; and the interview between them was one of peculiar interest. It is a strange

coincidence that the man who received Mr. Lincoln's first spoken and written utterance as the standard bearer of the republican party, received the last word he ever wrote as President of the United States.

On the twenty-third of June, which occurred on the following week, Mr. Lincoln responded to the letter which Mr. Ashmun presented him as follows:

"Sir: I accept the nomination tendered me by the convention over which you presided, of which I am formally apprised in a letter of yourself and others, acting as a committee of the convention for that purpose. The declaration of principles and sentiments which accompanies your letter meets my approval, and it shall be my care not to violate it, or disregard it in any part. Imploring the assistance of Divine Providence, and with due regard to the views and feelings of all who were represented in the convention, to the rights of all the states and territories and people of the nation, to the inviolability of the Constitution and the perpetual union, harmony and prosperity of all, I am most happy to co-operate for the practical success of the principles declared by the convention. Your obliged friend and fellow-citizen, "ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

"Hon. GEORGE ASHMUN."

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Thus was Abraham Lincoln placed before the nation as a candidate for the highest honor in its power to bestow. had been a long and tedious passage to this point in his history. He was in the fifty-second year of his age. He had spent half of his years in what was literally a wilderness. Born in the humblest and remotest obscurity, subjected to the rudest toil in the meanest offices, gathering his acquisitions from the scantiest sources, achieving the development of his powers by means of his own institution, he had, with none of the tricks of the demagogue, with none of the aids of wealth and social influence, with none of the opportunities for exhibiting his powers which high official position bestows, against all the combinations of genius and eminence and interest, raised himself by force of manly excellence of heart and brain into national recognition, and had become the focal center of the affectionate interest and curious inquisition of thirty millions of people at home, and of multitudes throughout the civilized world.

CHAPTER XVI.

AND now began a new life, so unlike anything that Mr. Lincoln had hitherto experienced that he found himself altogether afloat as to the proprieties of his position. His nomination had not elevated or elated him; and he did not see why it should change his manners or his bearing toward anybody. He had been diminished in his own estimation-in some respects humbled and oppressed-by the great responsibilities placed upon him, rather than made important and great. He was the people's instrument, the people's servant, the people's creation. He could put on none of the airs of eminence; he could place no bars between himself and those who had honored him. None of his old heartiness and simplicity left him. Men who entered his house impressed with a sense of his new dignities, found him the same honest, affectionate, true-hearted and simple-minded Abraham Lincoln that he had always been. He answered his own bell, accompanied his visitors to the door when they retired, and felt all that interfered with his old homely and hearty habits of hospitality as a burden—almost an impertinence.

From this moment to the moment of his death he knew nothing of leisure. He was astonished to find how many friends he had. They thronged his house from every quarter of the country. Probably no candidate for presidential honors was ever so beset by place-seekers and lion-hunters as was. Mr. Lincoln; for it is rare indeed that any man is nominated for the presidency with the same moral certainty of an elec

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tion which attachea to his prospects. It was almost universally believed, both at the North and the South, that he would be elected; and he was treated like a man who already had the reins of power in his hands.

Some of his friends who had witnessed his laborious way of receiving and dismissing his guests and visitors interposed with "Thomas," a colored servant who became very useful to him; but it was very hard and very unnatural for him to yield to another, and he a servant, the ministry of the courtesies which it was so much his delight to render; and he not unfrequently broke over the rules which his considerate advisers undertook to impose upon him. One thing was remarkable in these receptions-his attention to the humble and the poor. No poor, humble, scared man ever came into his house toward whom his heart did not at once go out with a gush of noble sympathy. To these he was always particularly attentive, and they were placed at ease at once. He took pains to show them that no change of circumstances could make him forget his early condition, or alienate his heart from those with whom he had shared the hardships and humilities of obscurity and poverty.

The interruption of family privacy and comfort by the constant throng of visitors at last became intolerable, and it was determined that Mr. Lincoln should hold his receptions elsewhere. Accordingly the Executive Chamber, a large fine room in the State House, was set apart for him; and in this room he met the public until, after his election, he departed for Washington. Here he met the millionaire and the menial, the priest and the politician, men, women and children, old friends and new friends, those who called for love and those who sought for office. From morning until night this was his business; and he performed it with conscientious care and the most unwearying patience.

As illustrative of the nature of many of his calls, a brace of incidents may be recorded as they were related to the writer by an eye-witness. Mr. Lincoln being seated in conversation with a gentleman one day, two raw, plainly dressed young

"Suckers" entered the room, and bashfully lingered near the door. As soon as he observed them, and apprehended their embarrassment, he rose and walked to them, saying, "How do you do, my good fellows? What can I do for you? Will you sit down?" The spokesman of the pair, the shorter of the two, declined to sit, and explained the object of the call thus: he had had a talk about the relative hight of Mr. Lincoln and his companion, and had asserted his belief that they were of exactly the same hight. He had come in to verify his judgment. Mr. Lincoln smiled, went and got his cane, and, placing the end of it upon the wall, said, "here, young man, come under here." The young man came under the cane, as Mr. Lincoln held it, and when it was perfectly adjusted to his hight, Mr. Lincoln said: "now come out and hold up the cane." This he did while Mr. Lincoln stepped under. Rubbing his head back and forth to see that it worked easily under the measurement, he stepped out, and declared to the sagacious fellow who was curiously looking on, that he had guessed with remarkable accuracy-that he and the young man were exactly of the same hight. Then he shook hands with them and sent them on their way. Mr. Lincoln would just as soon have thought of cutting off his right hand as he would have thought of turning those boys away with the impression that they had in any way insulted his dignity.

They had hardly disappeared when an old and modestly dressed woman made her appearance. She knew Mr. Lincoln, but Mr. Lincoln did not at first recognize her. Then she undertook to recall to his memory certain incidents connected with his rides upon the circuit-especially his dining at her house upon the road at different times. Then he remembered her and her home. Having fixed her own place in his recollection, she tried to recall to him a certain scanty dinner of bread and milk that he once ate at her house. He could not remember it-on the contrary, he only remembered that he had always fared well at her house. "Well," said she, “one day you came along after we had got through dinner, and we had eaten up everything, and I could give you nothing but a

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