I said to my elder brother again, “Wasn’t it a great thing to be introduced to all those people as the next President of the United States?” and my elder brother very wisely said:  “You do not know whether he was really happy or not.”  Afterwards, in 1864, when one of my soldiers was unjustly sentenced and his gray-haired mother plead with me to use what influence I would have with the President, I went to Washington and told the story to the President.  He said he had heard something about it from Mr. Stanton, and he said he would investigate the matter, and he did afterward decide that the man should not be put to death.  At the close of that interview I said to the President:  “I beg your pardon, Mr. Lincoln, but is it not a most exhausting thing to sit here hearing all these appeals and have all of this business on your hands?” He laid his head on his hand, and in a somewhat wearied manner, said, with a deep sigh:  “Yes, yes; no man ought to be ambitious to be President of the United States,” and said he, “When this war is over, and that won’t be very long, I tell my “Tad” that we will go back to the farm where I was happier as a boy when I dug potatoes at twenty-five cents a day than I am now; I tell him I will buy him a mule and a pony and he shall have a little cart and he shall make a little garden in a field all his own,” and the President’s face beamed as he arose from his chair in the delight of excitement as he said:  “Yes, I will be far happier than I have ever been here.”  The next time I looked in the face of Abraham Lincoln was in the east room of the White House at Washington as he lay in his coffin.  Not long ago at a Chautauqua lecture I was on the very farm which he bought at Salem, Illinois, and looked around the place where he had resolved to build a mansion, but which was never constructed.

Near my home in the Berkshires, Charles Dudley Warner was born.  When he had accomplished great things in literature and had written “My Summer in a Garden,” that popular work which attracted the attention of his newspaper friends, he went to Hartford, where the latter gave him a banquet.  I was invited to attend and report it for the public press.  They lauded him and said how beautiful it was to be so elevated above his fellow men, and how great he was in the estimation of the world But he in his answer to the toast said, “Gentlemen, I wish for no fame, I desire no glory and you have made a mistake if you think I enjoy any such notoriety.  I envy the Hartford teacher whose smile threw sunshine along her pathway.”  Then he told us the story of a poor little boy, cold and barefooted, standing on the street on a terribly cold day.  A lady came along, and looking kindly at him, said, “Little boy, are you cold?” The little fellow, looking up into her face, said, “Yes Ma’am, I was cold till you smiled.”  He would rather have a smile like that and the simple love of his fellow men than to have all the fame of the earth.  He was honored in all parts of the world by the greatest