convincing to her than to her friends, that he had been passing under an assumed name.  It seems that his absence was strangely prolonged, that for a long time she did not hear from him, that his letters when they did come puzzled her, that she clung to him long, but yielded at last to her friends, who urged their very natural suspicions upon her.  It is further suggested that there was some good explanation of his conduct all the while, and that she learnt this too late when actually engaged to Lincoln.  However that may be, shortly after her engagement to Lincoln she fell seriously ill, insisted, as she lay ill, on a long interview with Lincoln alone, and a day or two later died.  This was in 1835, when he was twenty-six.  It is perhaps right to say that one biographer throws doubt on the significance of this story in Lincoln’s life.  The details as to Ann Rutledge’s earlier lover are vague and uncertain.  The main facts of Lincoln’s first engagement and almost immediate loss of his betrothed are quite certain; the blow would have been staggering enough to any ordinary young lover and we know nothing of Lincoln which would discredit Mr. Herndon’s judgment that its effect on him was both acute and permanent.  There can be no real doubt that his spells of melancholy were ever afterwards more intense, and politer biographers should not have suppressed the testimony that for a time that melancholy seemed to his friends to verge upon insanity.  He always found good friends, and, as was to happen again later, one of them, Mr. Bowline Greene, carried him off to his own secluded home and watched him carefully.  He said “the thought that the snows and rains fell upon her grave filled him with indescribable grief.”  Two years later he told a fellow-legislator that “although he seemed to others to enjoy life rapturously, yet when alone he was so overcome by mental depression, he never dared to carry a pocket-knife.”  Later still Greene, who had helped him, died, and Lincoln was to speak over his grave.  For once in his life he broke down entirely; “the tears ran down his yellow and shrivelled cheeks. . . .  After repeated efforts he found it impossible to speak and strode away sobbing.”

The man whom a grief of this kind has affected not only intensely, but morbidly, is almost sure, before its influence has faded, to make love again, and is very likely to do so foolishly.  Miss Mary Owens was slightly older than Lincoln.  She was a handsome woman; commanding, but comfortable.  In the tales of Lincoln’s love stories, much else is doubtfully related, but the lady’s weight is in each case stated with assurance, and when she visited her sister in New Salem in 1836 Mary Owens weighed one hundred and fifty pounds.  There is nothing sad in her story; she was before long happily married—­not to Lincoln—­and she long outlived him.  But Lincoln, who had seen her on a previous visit and partly remembered her, had been asked, perhaps in jest, by her sister to marry her if she returned,