course throughout was good.  My father’s church was looked on somewhat askance.  “It’s lucky,” said a parishioner once, “that it has a stone face.”  Would Lincoln go to the Unitarian church?  Promptly at service-time Mr. Fillmore appeared with his guest, the two historic figures side by side in the pew.  Two or three rows intervened between it and that in which sat my mother and our household.  I beheld the scene only through the eyes of my kindred, for by that time I had flown the nest.  But I may be pardoned for noting here an interesting spectacle.  As they stood during the hymns, the contrast was picturesque.  Both men had risen from the rudest conditions through much early hardship.  Fillmore had been rocked in a sap-trough in a log-cabin scarcely better than Lincoln’s early shelter, and the two might perhaps have played an even match at splitting rails.  Fillmore, however, strangely adaptive, had taken on a marked grace of manner, his fine stature and mien carrying a dignified courtliness which is said to have won him a handsome compliment from Queen Victoria—­a gentleman rotund, well-groomed, conspicuously elegant.  Shoulder to shoulder with him rose the queer, raw-boned, ramshackle frame of the Illinoisan, draped in the artless handiwork of a prairie tailor, surmounted by the rugged, homely face.  The service, which the new auditor followed reverently, being finished, the minister, leaving the pulpit, gave Lincoln God-speed—­and so he passed on to his greatness.  My mother, sister, and brothers—­the youngest of whom before two years were gone was to fill a soldier’s grave—­stood close at hand.

I once saw Stephen A. Douglas, the man who was perhaps more closely associated than any other with the fame of Lincoln, for he was the human obstacle by overcoming whom Lincoln proved his fitness for the supreme place.  Douglas was a man marvellously strong.  Rhodes declares it would be hard to set bounds to his ability.  I saw him in 1850, when he was yet on the threshold, just beginning to make upon the country an impress of power.  Fillmore had recently, through Taylor’s death, become President, and was making his first visit to his home after his elevation, with members of his Cabinet and other conspicuous figures of his party.  How Douglas came to be of the company I wonder, for he was an ardent Jacksonian Democrat, but there he was on the platform before the multitude, and I, a boy of sixteen, watched him curiously, for he was young as compared with the grey heads about him.  His image, as he stood up to speak, is very clear to me even now—­a face strong-featured and ruddy with vigour beneath a massive forehead whose thatch had the blackness and luxuriance of youth.  His trunk was disproportionately large, carried on legs sturdy enough but noticeably short.  The wits used to describe him as the statesman “with coat-tails very near the ground.”  It is worth while to remark on this physical peculiarity because it was the direct opposite of Lincoln’s