When I left him, he asked me where I was quartered, and said he hoped I would be comfortable.

Jack Hancock was waiting for me, and we walked around the city, which even has barber shops.  Everywhere were signs of preparation, for the roads are getting dry, and the General preparing for a final campaign against Lee.  Poor Lee!  What a marvellous fight he has made with his material.  I think that he will be reckoned among the greatest generals of our race.

Of course, I was very anxious to get a glimpse of the President, and so we went down to the wharf, where we heard that he had gone off for a horseback ride.  They say that he rides nearly every day, over the corduroy roads and through the swamps, and wherever the boys see that tall hat they cheer.  They know it as well as the lookout tower on the flats of Bermuda Hundred.  He lingers at the campfires and swaps stories with the officers, and entertains the sick and wounded in the hospitals.  Isn’t it like him?

He hasn’t changed, either.  I believe that the great men don’t change.  Away with your Napoleons and your Marlboroughs and your Stuarts.  These are the days of simple men who command by force of character, as well as knowledge.  Thank God for the American!  I believe that he will change the world, and strip it of its vainglory and hypocrisy.

In the evening, as we were sitting around Hancock’s fire, an officer came in.

“Is Major Brice here?” he asked.  I jumped up.

“The President sends his compliments, Major, and wants to know if you would care to pay him a little visit.”

If I would care to pay him a little visit!  That officer had to hurry to keep up with the as I walked to the wharf.  He led me aboard the River Queen, and stopped at the door of the after-cabin.

Mr. Lincoln was sitting under the lamp, slouched down in his chair, in the position I remembered so well.  It was as if I had left him but yesterday.  He was whittling, and he had made some little toy for his son Tad, who ran out as I entered.

When he saw me, the President rose to his great height, a sombre, towering figure in black.  He wears a scraggly beard now.  But the sad smile, the kindly eyes in their dark caverns, the voice—­all were just the same.  I stopped when I looked upon the face.  It was sad and lined when I had known it, but now all the agony endured by the millions, North and South, seemed written on it.

“Don’t you remember me, Major?” he asked.

The wonder was that he had remembered me!  I took his big, bony hand, which reminded me of Judge Whipple’s.  Yes, it was just as if I had been with him always, and he were still the gaunt country lawyer.

“Yes, sir,” I said, “indeed I do.”

He looked at me with that queer expression of mirth he sometimes has.

“Are these Boston ways, Steve?” he asked.  “They’re tenacious.  I didn’t think that any man could travel so close to Sherman and keep ’em.”