A gentleman who, after the dreadful disaster at Fredericksburg, called at the White House with news direct from the front, says that Lincoln appeared so overwhelmed with grief that he was led to remark, “I heartily wish I might be a welcome messenger of good news instead,—­that I could tell you how to conquer or get rid of these rebellious States.”  Looking up quickly, with a marked change of expression, Lincoln said:  “That reminds me of two boys in Illinois who took a short cut across an orchard, and did not become aware of the presence of a vicious dog until it was too late to reach either fence.  One was spry enough to escape the attack by climbing a tree; but the other started around the tree, with the dog in hot pursuit, until by making smaller circles than it was possible for his pursuer to make, he gained sufficiently to grasp the dog’s tail, and held with desperate grip until nearly exhausted, when he hailed his companion and called to him to come down.  ‘What for?’ said the boy.  ‘I want you to help me let this dog go.’  If I could only let them go!” said the President, in conclusion; “but that is the trouble.  I am compelled to hold on to them and make them stay.”

In speaking of Lincoln’s fortitude under his trials and sufferings, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote:  “Although we believe he has never made any religious profession, we see evidence that in passing through this dreadful national crisis he has been forced by the very anguish of the struggle to look upward, where any rational creature must look for support.  No man has suffered more and deeper, albeit with a dry, weary, patient pain, that seemed to some like insensibility.  ’Whichever way it ends,’ he said to the writer, ’I have the impression that I sha’n’t last long after it’s over.’  After the dreadful repulse of Fredericksburg, his heavy eyes and worn and weary air told how our reverses wore upon him; and yet there was a never-failing fund of patience at bottom that sometimes rose to the surface in some droll, quaint saying or story, that forced a laugh even from himself.”

The care and sorrow which Lincoln was called upon to endure in the responsibilities of his high position graved their melancholy marks on each feature of his face.  He was a changed man.  A pathetic picture of his appearance at this time is given by his old friend, Noah Brooks, whose description of him as he appeared in 1856, on the stump in Ogle County, has already been given a place in these pages.  “I did not see Lincoln again,” says Mr. Brooks, “until 1862, when I went to Washington as a newspaper correspondent from California.  When Lincoln was on the stump in 1856, his face, though naturally sallow, had a rosy flush.  His eyes were full and bright, and he was in the fulness of health and vigor.  I shall never forget the shock which the sight of him gave me six years later in 1862, I took it for granted that he had forgotten the young man whom he had met five or six times during