apturously, yet when alone he was so overcome by mental
depression, he never dared to carry a pocket-knife." Later still
Greene, who had helped him, died, and Lincoln was to speak over his
grave. For once in his life he broke down entirely; "the tears ran
down his yellow and shrivelled cheeks. . . . After repeated efforts he
found it impossible to speak and strode away sobbing."

The man whom a grief of this kind has affected not only intensely, but
morbidly, is almost sure, before its influence has faded, to make love
again, and is very likely to do so foolishly. Miss Mary Owens was
slightly older than Lincoln. She was a handsome woman; commanding, but
comfortable. In the tales of Lincoln's love stories, much else is
doubtfully related, but the lady's weight is in each case stated with
assurance, and when she visited her sister in New Salem in 1836 Mary
Owens weighed one hundred and fifty pounds. There is nothing sad in
her story; she was before long happily married--not to Lincoln--and she
long outlived him. But Lincoln, who had seen her on a previous visit
and partly remembered her, had been asked, perhaps in jest, by her
sister to marry her if she returned, and had rashly announced half in
jest that he would. Her sister promptly fetched her, and he lingered
for some time in a half-engaged condition, writing her reasonable,
conscientious, feeble letters, in which he put before her
dispassionately the question whether she could patiently bear "to see
without sharing . . . a lot of flourishing about in carriages, . . . to
be poor without the means of hiding your poverty," and assuring her
that "I should be much happier with you than the way I am, provided I
saw no signs of discontent in you." Whether he rather wished to marry
her but felt bound to hold her free, or distinctly wished not to marry
her but felt bound not to hold himself free, he probably was never
sure. The lady very wisely decided that he could not make her happy,
and returned to Kentucky. She said he was deficient in the little
courteous attentions which a woman's happiness requires of her husband.
She gave instances long after to prove her point; but she always spoke
of him with friendship and respect as "a man with a heart full of human
kindness and a head full of common sense."

Rather unluckily, Lincoln, upon his rejection or release, relieved his
feelings in a letter about Miss Owens to one of the somewhat older
married ladies who were