and had rashly announced half in jest that he would.  Her sister promptly fetched her, and he lingered for some time in a half-engaged condition, writing her reasonable, conscientious, feeble letters, in which he put before her dispassionately the question whether she could patiently bear “to see without sharing . . . a lot of flourishing about in carriages, . . . to be poor without the means of hiding your poverty,” and assuring her that “I should be much happier with you than the way I am, provided I saw no signs of discontent in you.”  Whether he rather wished to marry her but felt bound to hold her free, or distinctly wished not to marry her but felt bound not to hold himself free, he probably was never sure.  The lady very wisely decided that he could not make her happy, and returned to Kentucky.  She said he was deficient in the little courteous attentions which a woman’s happiness requires of her husband.  She gave instances long after to prove her point; but she always spoke of him with friendship and respect as “a man with a heart full of human kindness and a head full of common sense.”

Rather unluckily, Lincoln, upon his rejection or release, relieved his feelings in a letter about Miss Owens to one of the somewhat older married ladies who were kind to him, the wife of one of his colleagues.  She ought to have burnt his letter, but she preserved it to kindle mild gossip after his death.  It is a burlesque account of his whole adventure, describing, with touches of very bad taste, his disillusionment with the now maturer charms of Miss Owens when her sister brought her back to New Salem, and making comedy of his own honest bewilderment and his mingled relief and mortification when she at last refused him.  We may take it as evidence of the natural want of perception and right instinctive judgment in minor matters which some who knew and loved him attribute to him.  But, besides that, the man who found relief in this ill-conceived exercise of humour was one in whom the prospect of marriage caused some strange and pitiful perturbation of mind.

This was in 1838, and a year later Mary Todd came from Kentucky to stay at Springfield with her brother-in-law Ninian Edwards, a legislator of Illinois and a close ally of Lincoln’s.  She was aged twenty-one, and her weight was one hundred and thirty pounds.  She was well educated, and had family connections which were highly esteemed.  She was pleasant in company, but somewhat imperious, and she was a vivacious talker.  When among the young men who now became attentive in calling on the Edwards’s Lincoln came and sat awkwardly gazing on Miss Todd, Mrs. Edwards appears to have remarked that the two were not suited to each other.  But an engagement took place all the same.  As to the details of what followed, whether he or she was the first to have doubts, and whether, as some say, the great Stephen Douglas appeared on the scene as a rival and withdrew rather generously