“All right?” asked Mr. Medill, reflecting the sheer astonishment of the others; “then why the devil are you wearing yourself out?  And why are we spending our time and money on you?”

Mr. Lincoln laid his hand on Medill’s sleeve.

“Joe,” said he, “a rat in the larder is easier to catch than a rat that has the run of the cellar.  You know, where to set your trap in the larder.  I’ll tell you why I’m in this campaign:  to catch Douglas now, and keep him out of the White House in 1860.  To save this country of ours, Joe.  She’s sick.”

There was a silence, broken by two exclamations.

“But see here, Abe,” said Mr. Medill, as soon as ever he got his breath, “what have we got to show for it?  Where do you come in?”

Mr. Lincoln smiled wearily.

“Nowhere, I reckon,” he answered simply.

“Good Lord!” said Mr. Judd.

Mr. Medill gulped.

“You mean to say, as the candidate of the Republican party, you don’t care whether you get to the Senate?”

“Not if I can send Steve Douglas there with his wings broken,” was the calm reply.

“Suppose he does answer yes, that slavery can be excluded?” said Mr. Judd.

“Then,” said Mr. Lincoln, “then Douglas loses the vote of the great slave-holders, the vote of the solid South, that he has been fostering ever since he has had the itch to be President.  Without the solid South the Little Giant will never live in the White House.  And unless I’m mightily mistaken, Steve Douglas has had his aye as far ahead as 1860 for some time.”

Another silence followed these words.  There was a stout man standing in the aisle, and he spat deftly out of the open window.

“You may wing Steve Douglas, Abe,” said he, gloomily, “but the gun will kick you over the bluff.”

“Don’t worry about me, Ed,” said Mr. Lincoln.  “I’m not worth it.”

In a wave of comprehension the significance of all this was revealed to Stephen Brice, The grim humor, the sagacious statesmanship, and (best of all)—­the superb self sacrifice of it, struck him suddenly.  I think it was in that hour that he realized the full extent of the wisdom he was near, which was like unto Solomon’s.

Shame surged in Stephen’s face that he should have misjudged him.  He had come to patronize.  He had remained to worship.  And in after years, when he thought of this new vital force which became part of him that day, it was in the terms of Emerson:  “Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh.  To be great is to be misunderstood.”

How many have conversed with Lincoln before and since, and knew him not!

If an outward and visible sign of Mr. Lincoln’s greatness were needed, —­he had chosen to speak to them in homely parables.  The story of Farmer Bell was plain as day.  Jim Rickets, who had life all his own way, was none other than Stephen A. Douglas, the easily successful.  The ugly galoot, who dared to raise his eyes only to the pear, was Mr. Lincoln himself.  And the pear was the Senatorship, which the galoot had denied himself to save Susan from being Mr. Rickets’ bride.