The shockingly careless appearance of the White House proved that whatever may have been Mrs. Lincoln’s other good qualities, she hadn’t earned the compliment which the Yankee farmer paid to his wife when he said:  “Ef my wife haint got an ear fer music, she’s got an eye fer dirt.”  When we reached the room of the President’s Private Secretary, my old friend, the Rev. Mr. Neill, of St. Paul’s, told me that it was military court day, when the President had to decide upon cases of army discipline that came before him and when he received no calls.  I told Neill that my mother could never die happy if she had not seen Lincoln.  He took in our names to the President, who told him to bring us in.  We entered the room in which the Cabinet usually met—­and there, before the fire, stood the tall, gaunt form attired in a seedy frock-coat, with his long hair unkempt, and his thin face the very picture of distress.  “How is Mrs. Lincoln?” inquired my mother.  “Oh,” said the President, “I have not seen her since seven o’clock this morning; Tad, how is your mother?” “She is pretty well,” replied the little fellow, who was coiled up then in an arm chair, the same lad we had seen playing down in the entrance hall.  We spent but a few moments with Mr. Lincoln, and when we came out my mother exclaimed:  “Oh, what a cruelty to keep that man here!  Did you ever see such a sad face in your life?” I never had, and I have given this account of my call on him in order that my readers may not only understand what democratic customs then prevailed in the White House, but may get some faint idea of the terribly trying life that Mr. Lincoln led.

Dr. Bellows, the President of the Sanitary Commission, once said to him:  “Mr. President, I am here at almost every hour of the day or night, and I never saw you at the table, do you ever eat?” “I try to,” replied the President; “I manage to browse about pretty much as I can get it.”  After the long wearing, nerve-taxing days were over in which he was glad to relieve himself occasionally with a good story or a merry laugh, came the nights of anxiety when sleep was often banished from his pillow.  He frequently wrapped himself in his Scotch shawl, and at midnight stole across to the War Office, and listened to the click of the telegraph instruments, which brought sometimes good news, and sometimes terrible tales of defeat.  On the day after he heard of the awful slaughter at Fredericksburg, he remarked at the War Office:  “If any of the lost in hell suffered worse than I did last night, I pity them.”  Nothing but iron nerves and a dependence on the divine arm bore him through.  He once said:  “I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go; my own wisdom and that of all around me seemed insufficient for the day.”  We call him “Our Martyr President,” but the martyrdom lasted for four whole years!