as if to shake hands, when I told him I had come at his bidding.  Presently he roused a little, and remarked that he had had ‘a mighty hard day.’” Mr. Riddle, who saw him at this period, after some months’ absence, says he was shocked, on gaining admission to the President, “by his appearance—­that of a baited, cornered man, always on the defense against attacks that he could not openly meet and defy or punish.”  Mr. Carpenter, an inmate of the White House, says:  “Absorbed in his papers, he would become unconscious of my presence, while I intently studied every line and shade of expression in that furrowed face.  There were days when I could scarcely look into it without crying.  During the first week of the battles of the Wilderness he scarcely slept at all.  Passing through the main hall of the domestic apartment on one of these days, I met him, clad in a long morning wrapper, pacing back and forth a narrow passage leading to one of the windows, his hands behind him, great black rings under his eyes, his head bent forward upon his breast,—­altogether such a picture of the effects of sorrow, care, and anxiety as would have melted the hearts of the worst of his adversaries, who so mistakenly applied to him the epithets of tyrant and usurper.”

Mr. Edward Dicey, the English historian, says:  “Never in my knowledge have I seen a sadder face than that of the late President during the time his features were familiar to me.  It is so easy to be wise after the event; but it seems to me now that one ought somehow to have foreseen that the stamp of a sad end was impressed by nature on that rugged, haggard face.  The exceeding sadness of the eyes and their strange sweetness were the one redeeming feature in a face of unusual plainness, and there was about them that odd, weird look, which some eyes possess, of seeming to see more than the outer objects of the world around.”

Lincoln’s family and friends strove to beguile him of his melancholy.  They took him to places of amusement; they walked and drove with him in the pleasantest scenes about the capital; and above all, they talked with him of times past, seeking to divert his mind from its present distress by reviving memories of more joyous days.  His old friends were, as Mr. Arnold states, “shocked with the change in his appearance.  They had known him at his home, and at the courts in Illinois, with a frame of iron and nerves of steel; as a man who hardly knew what illness was, ever genial and sparkling with frolic and fun, nearly always cheery and bright.  Now they saw the wrinkles on his face and forehead deepen into furrows; the laugh of old days was less frequent, and it did not seem to come from the heart.  Anxiety, responsibility, care, thought, disasters, defeats, the injustice of friends, wore upon his giant frame, and his nerves of steel became at times irritable.  He said one day, with a pathos which language cannot describe, ’I feel as though I shall never be glad again.’”