on his face, and he seemed to take no pleasure in the demonstrations of enthusiasm which his presence called forth.  His clothes were very ill-fitting, and his long arms and hands protruded far through his coat sleeves, giving him a peculiarly uncouth appearance.  Though I had often seen him before, and had heard him in court—­always with delight in his clearness and cogency of statement, his illuminating humor, and his conspicuous fairness and candor—­yet I had never before seen him when he appeared so homely; and I thought him about the ugliest man I had ever seen.  There was nothing in his looks or manner that was prepossessing.  Such he appeared as he rode in the procession on the forenoon of that warm summer day.  His appearance was not different in the afternoon of that day, when, in the public square, he first stood before the great multitude who had assembled there to hear him.  His powers were aroused gradually as he went on with his speech.  There was much play of humor.  ’Judge Douglas has,’ he said, ’one great advantage of me in this contest.  When he stands before his admiring friends, who gather in great numbers to hear him, they can easily see, with half an eye, all kinds of fat offices sprouting out of his fat and jocund face, and, indeed, from every part of his plump and well-rounded body.  His appearance is therefore irresistibly attractive.  His friends expect him to be President, and they expect their reward.  But when I stand before the people, not the sharpest vision is able to detect in my lean and lank person, or in my sunken and hollow cheeks, the faintest sign or promise of an office.  I am not a candidate for the Presidency, and hence there is no beauty in me that men should desire me.’  The crowd was convulsed with laughter at this sally.  As the speech went on, the speaker, though often impressing his points with apposite and laughter-provoking stories, grew more and more earnest.  He showed that the government was founded in the interest of freedom, not slavery.  He traced the steady aggressions of the slave power step by step, until he came to declare and to dwell upon the fact of the irrepressible conflict between the two.  Then, as he went on to show, with wonderful eloquence of speech and of manner, that the country must and would ultimately become, not all slave, but all free, he was transfigured before his audience.  His homely countenance fairly glowed with the splendor of his prophetic speech; and his body, no longer awkward and ungainly, but mastered and swayed by his thought, became an obedient and graceful instrument of eloquent expression.  The whole man seemed to speak.  He seemed like some grand Hebrew prophet, whose face was glorified by the bright visions of a better day which he saw and declared.  His eloquence was not merely that of clear and luminous statement, felicitous illustration, or excited yet restrained feeling; it was the eloquence also of thought.  With something of the