at a time specified, after Major Wilcox should have had opportunity to look the ground over.  Major Wilcox says that he went to the railroad depot to meet Lincoln at the train.  It was in the afternoon, towards night.  The day had been quite warm, and the road was dry and dusty.  He found Lincoln just emerging from the depot.  He had on a thin suit of summer clothes, his coat being a linen duster, much soiled.  His whole appearance was decidedly shabby.  He carried in his hand an old-fashioned carpet-sack, which added to the oddity of his appearance.  Major Wilcox says if it had been anybody else he would have been rather shy of being seen in his company, because of the awkward and unseemly appearance he presented.  Lincoln immediately began to talk about his chances for the appointment; whereupon Major Wilcox related to him everything that had transpired, and what President Taylor had said to him.  They proceeded at once to Major Wilcox’s room, where they sat down to look over the situation.  Lincoln took from his pocket a paper he had prepared in the case, which comprised eleven reasons why he should be appointed Commissioner of the General Land Office.  Amongst other things Lincoln presented the fact that he had been a member of Congress from Illinois two years; that his location was in the West, where the government lands were; that he was a native of the West, and had been reared under Western influences.  He gave reasons why the appointment should be given to Illinois, and particularly to the southern part of the State.  Major Wilcox says that he was forcibly struck by the clear, convincing, and methodical statement of Lincoln as contained in these eleven reasons why he should have the appointment.  But it was given to Mr. Butterfield.

After Lincoln became President, a Member of Congress asked him for an appointment in the army in behalf of a son of the same Justin Butterfield.  When the application was presented, the President paused, and after a moment’s silence, said:  “Mr. Justin Butterfield once obtained an appointment I very much wanted, in which my friends believed I could have been useful, and to which they thought I was fairly entitled.  I hardly ever felt so bad at any failure in my life.  But I am glad of an opportunity of doing a service to his son.”  And he made an order for his commission.  In lieu of the desired office, General Taylor offered Lincoln the post of Governor, and afterwards of Secretary, of Oregon Territory; but these offers he declined.  In after years a friend remarked to him, alluding to the event:  “How fortunate that you declined!  If you had gone to Oregon you might have come back as Senator, but you would never have been President.”  “Yes, you are probably right,” said Lincoln; and then, with a musing, dreamy look, he added:  “I have all my life been a fatalist.  What is to be, will be; or, rather, I have found all my life, as Hamlet says,—­

    ’There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
    Rough-hew them how we will.’”