“By Jing!” he exclaimed, “we have got a general.  Caesar burnt his bridges behind him, but Sherman burns his rails.  Now tell me some more.”

He helped me along by asking questions.  Then I began to tell him how the negroes had flocked into our camps, and how simply and plainly the General had talked to them, advising them against violence of any kind, and explaining to them that “Freedom” meant only the liberty to earn their own living in their own way, and not freedom from work.

“We have got a general, sure enough,” he cried.  “He talks to them plainly, does he, so that they understand?  I say to you, Brice,” he went on earnestly, “the importance of plain talk can’t be overestimated.  Any thought, however abstruse, can be put in speech that a boy or a negro can grasp.  Any book, however deep, can be written in terms that everybody can comprehend, if a man only tries hard enough.  When I was a boy I used to hear the neighbors talking, and it bothered me so because I could not understand them that I used to sit up half the night thinking things out for myself.  I remember that I did not know what the word demonstrate meant.  So I stopped my studies then and there and got a volume of Euclid.  Before I got through I could demonstrate everything in it, and I have never been bothered with demonstrate since.”

I thought of those wonderfully limpid speeches of his:  of the Freeport debates, and of the contrast between his style and Douglas’s.  And I understood the reason for it at last.  I understood the supreme mind that had conceived the Freeport Question.  And as I stood before him then, at the close of this fearful war, the words of the Gospel were in my mind.  ’So the last shall be first, and the first, last; for many be called, but few chosen.’

How I wished that all those who have maligned and tortured him could talk with him as I had talked with him.  To know his great heart would disarm them of all antagonism.  They would feel, as I feel, that his life is so much nobler than theirs, and his burdens so much heavier, that they would go away ashamed of their criticism.

He said to me once, “Brice, I hope we are in sight of the end, now.  I hope that we may get through without any more fighting.  I don’t want to see any more of our countrymen killed.  And then,” he said, as if talking to himself, “and then we must show them mercy—­mercy.”

I thought it a good time to mention Colfax’s case.  He has been on my mind ever since.  Mr. Lincoln listened attentively.  Once he sighed, and he was winding his long fingers around each other while I talked.

“I saw the man captured, Mr. Lincoln,” I concluded, “And if a technicality will help him out, he was actually within his own skirmish line at the time.  The Rebel skirmishers had not fallen back on each side of him.”

“Brice,” he said, with that sorrowful smile, “a technicality might save Colfax, but it won’t save me.  Is this man a friend of yours?” he asked.