LINCOLN'S BOOK CRITICISM. (continued 4)

"I am but an individual, and my removal will not in any way advance the other folks in their endeavors."

In fact, it was so--the misdeed was a double-edged blade which cut both ways. It will never be known, probably, how near a massacre followed the explosion of indignation at that maniac's murder of the Emancipator. Fortunately for the unsullied robe of Columbia, a hundred advocates of leaving retribution to Heaven echoed Garfield's appeasing address.

Lincoln met the intermediator, but the ultimate negotiation fell through, like the others all. He came home from City Point with sadness, but from his seed has outcome the Universal Peace Tribunal of The Hague. Professor Martens based his original plea of the czar's on the Lincolnian guide for the soldiers in our war.

THE POISONING PLOT.

A servant at the White House testifies that he was approached by emissaries who offered him a sum almost preposterously large to put a powder in the milk for the Lincoln family's table. The agents knew that they were temperance followers, milk being as common as wine at previous tenants' table. This was laughed at before the shadow of Booth's patricide was cast ahead. But the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher publicly declares--and he was in the state secrets as deeply as any layman--that President-General Harrison, "Tippecanoe," was poisoned that Tyler might fulfil the plan to annex Texas as a slave State. "With even stronger convictions is it affirmed that President-General Taylor was poisoned, that a less stern successor might give a suppler instrument to manage. Who doubts now that it was attempted Breckenridge in his room?"

NOTHING LIKE GETTING USED TO THINGS!

The more evident it grew that the President, at whom the stupid jeers persisted through incurable density of his enemies, was the vital motor of the Union cause, than threats of violently removing him were continually sent him. So many such letters accumulated that he grimly packeted them together and labeled the mass: "Assassination Papers." It was a Damoclesian dagger of which he spoke lightly, because fear of death never awed him. When a man walks in the manifest path traced out for him by Heaven, he does not tremble. But friends, more concerned by the strain in watching over his safety, expressing surprise at his indifference, he tried to reassure them:

"Oh, there is nothing like getting used to things!"

MOST AFRAID OF A FRIENDLY SHOT.

General Wadsworth, in his anxiety about the President's safety in Washington, swarming with insurgent agents, set a cavalry guard over the President's carriage. He went and complained to General Halleck, in charge of the capital, saying only partly facetiously:

"Why, Mrs. Lincoln and I cannot hear ourselves talk for the clatter of their sabers and spurs; and some of them appear to be new hands and very awkward, so that I am more afraid of being shot by the accidental discharge of a carbine or revolver than of any attempt upon my life by a roving squad of 'Jeb' Stuart's cavalry."

(Since Stuart came twenty miles within the Union lines, he was the criterion of rebel raiders' possibilities.)

THE ONE WORD HE HAD LEARNED.

A tale-bearer came to the President with a plot against him and the government, which was a cock-and-bull without any adherence, and all superficial. Lincoln heard him out, but then sharply returned:

"There is one thing that I have learned, and that you have not. It is only one word: 'Thorough!'" Then bringing his huge hand down on the table-desk, to emphasize his meaning, he repeated: "Thorough!"

NOT TO DISAPPOINT THE PEOPLE.

The strictly religious went so far as to call the Lincoln assassination a judgment(!), as it happened in a playhouse on a Good Friday! It appears that the President had compunctions, and at the last moment was disinclined to go, though a party had been made up to oblige a young espoused couple; but General Grant, who was to be a feature of the commanded performance, was called away--no doubt escaping the knife the murderer had in reserve to his pistol. The President said that he must go, not to disappoint the people on this gala night, as the rejoicing was wide over the dissolution of the Confederacy.

NOTHING LIKE PRAYER--BUT PRAISE.

In 1862, the President suffered "an affliction harder to bear than the war!" His son Willie (William, next to one that died in infancy) was carried off by typhoid fever, under the presidential roof; and another, "Tad," (Thomas, who actually lived to be twenty and passed away in Illinois) was given up by the physicians. At this crisis Miss Dix, daughter of the general famous for his order: "If any one offers to pull down the American flag, shoot him on the spot," recommended an army nurse, Mrs. Rebecca R. Pomeroy. She was a born succorer, pious and fortifying. She came reluctantly to the important errand, as she had to leave a wardful of wounded soldiers. She had lost many of her family, and was able to comfort from gaging the affectionate father's grief. She led him to pray in his double racking of bad war news and the domestic distress.

On next seeing him and that he was less grieved, for news of the Fort Donaldson surrender to General Grant arrived in the meantime, she hastened to say:

"There is nothing like prayer, Mr. President!"

"Yes, there is: Praise! Prayer and praise must go together!"

THE END.