off the end of a piece of broom-handle.  I remarked to him that he need not whittle off the edges.  ‘Oh, well,’ said he, ’I thought I would like to have it nice.’  When I had successfully cast the mould of the right hand, I began the left, pausing a few moments to hear Mr. Lincoln tell me about a scar on the thumb.  ’You have heard that they call me a rail-splitter, and you saw them carrying rails in the procession Saturday evening; well, it is true that I did split rails, and one day, while I was sharpening a wedge on a log, the axe glanced and nearly took my thumb off, and there is the scar, you see.’  The right hand appeared swollen as compared with the left, on account of excessive hand-shaking the evening before; this difference is distinctly shown in the cast.  That Sunday evening I returned to Chicago with the moulds of his hands, three photographic negatives of him, the identical black alpaca campaign suit of 1858, and a pair of Lynn newly-made pegged boots.  The clothes were all burned up in the great Chicago fire.  The casts of the face and hands I saved by taking them with me to Rome, and they have crossed the sea four times.  The last time I saw Mr. Lincoln was in January, 1861, at his house in Springfield.  His little parlor was full of friends and politicians.  He introduced me to them all, and remarked to me aside that since he had sat to me for his bust, eight or nine months before, he had lost forty pounds in weight.  This was easily perceptible, for the lines of his jaws were very sharply defined through the short beard which he was allowing to grow.  Then he turned to the company and explained in a general way that I had made a bust of him before his nomination, and that he was then giving daily sittings to another sculptor; that he had sat to him for a week or more, but could not see the likeness, though he might yet bring it out.  ‘But,’ continued Mr. Lincoln, ’in two or three days after Mr. Volk began my bust, there was the animal himself!’ And this was about the last, if not the last, remark I ever heard him utter, except the good-bye and his good wishes for my success.”

Saturday, May 19, the committee of the Chicago convention arrived at Springfield to notify Mr. Lincoln of his nomination.  The Hon. George Ashmun, as chairman of the committee, delivered the formal address, to which Lincoln listened with dignity, but with an air of profound sadness, as though the trials in store for him had already “cast their shadows before.”  In response to the address, Lincoln said: 

MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN OF THE COMMITTEE:—­I tender to you and through you to the Republican National convention, and all the people represented in it, my profoundest thanks for the high honor done me, which you now formally announce.  Deeply and even painfully sensible of the great responsibility which is inseparable from this high honor—­a responsibility which I could almost wish had fallen upon some one of the far more eminent men and