It seems impossible to arrive at all the causes of Lincoln’s melancholy disposition.  He was, according to his most intimate friends, totally unlike other people,—­was, in fact, “a mystery.”  But whatever the history or the cause,—­whether physical reasons, the absence of domestic concord, a series of painful recollections of his mother, of early sorrows and hardships, of Anne Rutledge and fruitless hopes, or all these combined,—­Lincoln was a terribly sad and gloomy man.  “I do not think that he knew what happiness was for twenty years,” says Mr. Herndon. “‘Terrible’ is the word which all his friends used to describe him in the black mood.  ‘It was terrible!  It was terrible!’ said one to another.”  Judge Davis believes that Lincoln’s hilarity was mainly simulated, and that “his stories and jokes were intended to whistle off sadness.”  “The groundwork of his social nature was sad,” says Judge Scott.  “But for the fact that he studiously cultivated the humorous, it would have been very sad indeed.  His mirth always seemed to me to be put on; like a plant produced in a hot-bed, it had an unnatural and luxuriant growth.”  Mr. Herndon, Lincoln’s law-partner and most intimate friend, describes him at this period as a “thin, tall, wiry, sinewy, grizzly, raw-boned man, looking ‘woe-struck.’  His countenance was haggard and careworn, exhibiting all the marks of deep and protracted suffering.  Every feature of the man—­the hollow eyes, with the dark rings beneath; the long, sallow, cadaverous face intersected by those peculiar deep lines; his whole air; his walk; his long silent reveries, broken at long intervals by sudden and startling exclamations, as if to confound an observer who might suspect the nature of his thoughts,—­showed he was a man of sorrows, not sorrows of to-day or yesterday, but long-treasured and deep, bearing with him a continual sense of weariness and pain.  He was a plain, homely, sad, weary-looking man, to whom one’s heart warmed involuntarily because he seemed at once miserable and kind.”

Mr. Page Eaton, an old resident of Springfield, says:  “Lincoln always did his own marketing, even after he was elected President and before he went to Washington.  I used to see him at the butcher’s or baker’s every morning, with his basket on his arm.  He was kind and sociable, and would always speak to everyone.  He was so kind, so childlike, that I don’t believe there was one in the city who didn’t love him as a father or brother.”  “On a winter’s morning,” says Mr. Lamon, “he could be seen wending his way to the market, with a basket on his arm and at his side a little boy whose small feet rattled and pattered over the ice-bound pavement, attempting to make up by the number of his short steps for the long strides of his father.  The little fellow jerked at the bony hand which held his, and prattled and questioned, begged and grew petulant, in a vain effort to make his father talk to him.  But the latter was probably unconscious of the other’s existence, and stalked