at least he could see to it that the words were real and were short; at least he would not, so, exhaust their patience.  And the work might as well be done now in the leisure of the journey.  He put a hand, big, powerful, labor-knotted, into first one sagging pocket and then another, in search of a pencil, and drew out one broken across the end.  He glanced about inquiringly—­there was nothing to write upon.  Across the car the Secretary of State had just opened a package of books and their wrapping of brown paper lay on the floor, torn carelessly in a zigzag.  The President stretched a long arm.

“Mr. Seward, may I have this to do a little writing?” he asked, and the Secretary protested, insisting on finding better material.

But Lincoln, with few words, had his way, and soon the untidy stump of a pencil was at work and the great head, the deep-lined face, bent over Seward’s bit of brown paper, the whole man absorbed in his task.

Earnestly, with that “capacity for taking infinite pains” which has been defined as genius, he labored as the hours flew, building together close-fitted word on word, sentence on sentence.  As the sculptor must dream the statue prisoned in the marble, as the artist must dream the picture to come from the brilliant unmeaning of his palette, as the musician dreams a song, so he who writes must have a vision of his finished work before he touches, to begin it, a medium more elastic, more vivid, more powerful than any other—­words—­prismatic bits of humanity, old as the Pharaohs, new as the Arabs of the street, broken, sparkling, alive, from the age-long life of the race.  Abraham Lincoln, with the clear thought in his mind of what he would say, found the sentences that came to him colorless, wooden.  A wonder flashed over him once or twice of Everett’s skill with these symbols which, it seemed to him, were to the Bostonian a key-board facile to make music, to Lincoln tools to do his labor.  He put the idea aside, for it hindered him.  As he found the sword fitted to his hand he must fight with it; it might be that he, as well as Everett, could say that which should go straight from him to his people, to the nation who struggled at his back towards a goal.  At least each syllable he said should be chiselled from the rock of his sincerity.  So he cut here and there an adjective, here and there a phrase, baring the heart of his thought, leaving no ribbon or flower of rhetoric to flutter in the eyes of those with whom he would be utterly honest.  And when he had done he read the speech and dropped it from his hand to the floor and stared again from the window.  It was the best he could do, and it was a failure.  So, with the pang of the workman who believes his work done wrong, he lifted and folded the torn bit of paper and put it in his pocket, and put aside the thought of it, as of a bad thing which he might not better, and turned and talked cheerfully with his friends.