blessedness. Every wife is like the
Mother of God and has the hope of bearing a saviour of mankind."

She lay very still in her great joy. The boy in a fright sprang to her
side, knocking over the stool with the pannikin of water. He knelt on
the floor and hid his face in the bed-clothes. Her hand found his shaggy
head.

Her voice was very faint now, but he heard it.

"Don't cry, little Abe," she said. "Don't you worry about the ring,
dearie. It ain't needed no more."

Half an hour later, when the cabin door was dim with twilight, the hand
which the boy held grew cold.

CHAPTER 14. THE END OF THE ROAD

When Edward M. Stanton was associated at Cincinnati in 1857 with Abraham
Lincoln in the great McCormick Reaper patent suit, it was commonly
assumed that this was the first time the two men had met. Such was
Lincoln's view, for his memory was apt to have blind patches in it. But
in fact there had been a meeting fifteen years before, the recollection
of which in Stanton's mind had been so overlaid by the accumulations of
a busy life that it did not awake till after the President's death.

In the early fall of 1842 Stanton had occasion to visit Illinois. He was
then twenty-five years of age, and had already attained the position of
leading lawyer in his native town of Steubenville in Ohio and acted as
reporter of the Supreme Court of that State. He was a solemn reserved
young man, with a square fleshy face and a strong ill-tempered jaw. His
tight lips curved downwards at the corners and, combined with his bold
eyes, gave him an air of peculiar shrewdness and purpose. He did not
forget that he came of good professional stock--New England on one side
and Virginia on the other--and that he was college-bred, unlike the
common backwoods attorney. Also he was resolved on a great career, with
the White House at the end of it, and was ready to compel all whom
he met to admit the justice of his ambition The conscious of uncommon
talent and a shining future gave him a self-possession rare in a young
man, and a complacence not unlike arrogance. His dress suited his
pretensions--the soft rich broadcloth which tailors called doeskin, and
linen of a fineness rare outside the eastern cities. He was not popular
in Ohio, but he was respected for his sharp tongue, subtle brain, and
intractable honesty.

His business finished, he had the task of filling up the evening, for he
could not leave for home till the morrow. His host, Mr.