old neighbor.  When we boys in a strange city saw that familiar face, oh, the emotions that arose in our hearts!  How proud we were at that hour, that he, our neighbor, was presiding on that occasion.  He took his seat on the stage, the right of which was left vacant for some one yet to come.  Next came a very heavy man, but immediately following him a tall, lean man.  Mr. Bryant arose and went toward him, bowing and smiling.  He was an awkward specimen of a man and all about me people were asking “Who is that?” but no man seemed to know.  I asked a gentleman who that man was, but he said he didn’t know.  He was an awkward specimen indeed; one of the legs of his trousers was up about two inches above his shoe; his hair was dishevelled and stuck out like rooster’s feathers; his coat was altogether too large for him in the back, his arms much longer than the sleeves, and with his legs twisted around the rungs of the chair, was the picture of embarrassment.  When Mr. Bryant arose to introduce the speaker of that evening, he was known seemingly to few in that great hall.  Mr. Bryant said:  “Gentlemen of New York, you have your favorite son in Mr. Seward and if he were to be President of the United States, every one of us would be proud of him.”  Then came great applause.  “Ohio has her favorite son in Judge Wade; and the nation would prosper under his administration, but Gentlemen of New York, it is a great honor that is conferred upon me to-night, for I can introduce to you the next President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln.”  Then through that audience flew the query as to whom Abraham Lincoln was.  There was but weak applause.  Mr. Lincoln had in his hand a manuscript.  He had written it with great care and exactness and the speech which you read in his biography is the one that he wrote, not the one that he delivered as I recall it, and it is fortunate for the country that they did print the one that he wrote.  I think the one he wrote had already been set up in type that afternoon from his manuscript, and consequently they did not go over it to see whether it had been changed or not.  He had read three pages and had gone on to the fourth when he lost his place and then he began to tremble and stammer.  He then turned it over two or three times, threw the manuscript upon the table, and, as they say in the west, “let himself go.”  Now the stammering man who had created only silent derision up to that point, suddenly flashed out into an angel of oratory and the awkward arms and dishevelled hair were lost sight of entirely in the wonderful beauty and lofty inspiration of that magnificent address.  The great audience immediately began to follow his thought, and when he uttered that quotation from Douglass, “It is written on the sky of America that the slaves shall some day be free,” he had settled the question that he was to be the next President of the United States.  The applause was so-great that the building trembled and I felt the windows shake behind me.  Afterward, as we walked home,