On the next day I addressed a thousand negro children, and when I enquired, “May I send an invitation to the good Abraham Lincoln to come down and visit you?” one thousand little black hands went up with a shout.  Alas, we knew not that at that very hour their beloved benefactor was lying cold and silent in the East room at Washington!  At Fortress Monroe, on our homeward voyage, the terrible tidings of the President’s assassination pierced us like a dagger, on the wharf.  Near the Fortress poor negro women had hung pieces of coarse black muslin around every little huckster’s tables.  “Yes, sah, Fathah Lincum’s dead.  Dey killed our bes’ fren, but God be libben; dey can’t kill Him, I’s sho ob dat.”  Her simple childlike faith seemed to reach up and grasp the everlasting arm which had led Lincoln while leading her race “out of the house of bondage.”

Upon our arrival in New York, we found the city draped in black, and “the mourners going about the streets.”  When the remains of the murdered President reached New York they were laid in state in the City Hall for one day and night, and during that whole night the procession passed the coffin—­never ceasing for a moment.  Between three and four o’clock in the morning I took my family there, that they might see the face of our beloved martyr, and we had to take our place in a line as far away as Park Row.  It is impossible to give any adequate description of the funeral—­whose like was never seen before or since—­when eminent authors, clergymen, judges and distinguished civilians walked on foot through streets, shrouded in black to the house tops.  The whole journey to Springfield, Ill., was one constant manifestation of poignant grief.  The people rose in the night, simply to see the funeral train pass by.  I do not wonder that when Emperor Alexander, of Russia (who was himself afterwards assassinated) heard the tidings of our President’s death from an American Ambassador, he leaped from his chair, and exclaimed, “Good God, can it be so?  He was the noblest man alive.”

Thirty-seven years have passed away, and to-day while our nation reveres the name of Washington, as the Father of his Country; Abraham Lincoln is the best loved man that ever trod this continent.  The Almighty educated him in His own Providence for his high mission.  The “plain people,” as he called them, were his University; the Bible and John Bunyan were his earliest text-books.  Sometimes his familiarity with the Scriptures came out very amusingly as when a deputation of bankers called on him, to negotiate for a loan to the Government, and one of them said to him:  “You know, Mr. President, where the treasure is, there will the heart be also.”  “I should not wonder,” replied Lincoln, “if another text would not fit the case better, ’Where the carcass is, there will the eagles be gathered together,’” His innumerable jests contained more wisdom than many a philosopher’s maxims, and underneath his plebeian simplicity, dress and manners, this great child of nature possessed the most delicate instincts of the perfect gentleman.  The only just scale by which to measure any man is the scale of actual achievement; and in Lincoln’s case some of the most essential instruments had to be fabricated by himself.