But for my heart’s content in that new land, I think I’d rather loaf with Lincoln along a river bank.  I know I could understand him.  I would not have to learn who were his friends and who his enemies, what theories he was committed to, and what against.  We could just talk and open out our minds, and tell our doubts and swap the longings of our hearts that others never heard of.  He wouldn’t try to master me nor to make me feel how small I was.  I’d dare to ask him things and know that he felt awkward about them, too.  And I would find, I know I would, that he had hit his shin just on those very stumps that had hit me.  We’d talk of men a lot, the kind they call the great.  I would not find him scornful.  Yet boys that he knew in New Salem would somehow appear larger in their souls, than some of these that I had called the great.  His wise eyes saw qualities that weighed more than smartness.  Yes, we would sit down where the bank sloped gently to the quiet stream and glance at the picture of our people, the negroes being lynched, the miners’ civil war, labor’s hold ups, employers’ ruthlessness, the subordination of humanity to industry,—­

The end