8.  Gore, 84-95; Lamon, 16; Herndon, 16.

9.  Gore, 181-182, 296, 303-316; Lamon, 19-20; N. and H., I, 28-29.

II.  The mysterious youth.

1.  N. and H., I, 32-34.

2.  Lamon, 33-38, 51-52, 61-63; N. and H., 1, 34-36.

3.  N. and H., 1, 40.

4.  Lamon, 38, 40, 55.

5.  Reminiscences, 54, 428.

III.  A village leader.

1.  N. and H., 1, 45-46, 70-72; Herndon, 67, 69, 72.

2.  Lamon, 81-82; Herndon, 75-76.

3.  Lincoln, 1, 1-9.

4.  Lamon, 125-126; Herndon, 104.

5.  Herndon, 117-118.

6.  N. and H., 1, 109.

7.  Stories, 94.

8.  Herndon, 118-123.

9.  Lamon, 159-164; Herndon, 128-138; Rankin, 61-95.

10.  Lamon, 164.

11.  Lamon, 164-165; Rankin, 95.

IV.  Revelations.

1.  Riddle, 337.

2.  Herndon, 436.

3.  N. and H., I, 138.

4.  Lincoln, I, 51-52.

5.  McClure, 65.

6.  Herndon, 184.185.

7.  Anon, 172-183; Herndon, 143-150, 161; Lincoln, 1, 87-92.

8.  Gossip has preserved a melodramatic tale with regard to Lincoln’s marriage.  It describes the bride to be, waiting, arrayed, in tense expectation deepening into alarm; the guests assembled, wondering, while the hour appointed passes by and the ceremony does not begin; the failure of the prospective bridegroom to appear; the scattering of the company, amazed, their tongues wagging.  The explanation offered is an attack of insanity.  Herndon, 215; I,anon, 239-242.  As might be expected Lincoln’s secretaries who see him always in a halo give no hint of such an event.  It has become a controversial scandal.  Is it a fact or a myth?  Miss Tarbell made herself the champion of the mythical explanation and collected a great deal of evidence that makes it hard to accept the story as a fact Tarbell, I, Chap.  XI.  Still later a very sane memoirist, Henry B. Rankin, who knew Lincoln, and is not at all an apologist, takes the same view.  His most effective argument is that such an event could not have occurred in the little country town of Springfield without becoming at the time the common property of all the gossips.  The evidence is bewildering.  I find myself unable to accept the disappointed wedding guests as established facts, even though the latest student of Herndon has no doubts.  Lincoln and Herndon, 321-322.  But whether the broken marriage story is true or false there is no doubt that Lincoln passed through a desolating inward experience about “the fatal first of January”; that it was related to the breaking of his engagement; and that for a time his sufferings were intense.  The letters to Speed are the sufficient evidence.  Lincoln, I, 175; 182-189; 210-219; 240; 261; 267-269.  The prompt explanation of insanity may be cast aside, one of those foolish delusions of shallow people to whom all abnormal conditions are of the same nature as all others.  Lincoln wrote to a noted Western physician, Doctor Drake of Cincinnati, with regard to his “case”—­that is, his nervous breakdown—­and Doctor Drake replied but refused to prescribe without an interview.  Lamon, 244.