, his hand and pen,
He will be good, but God knows when."

Not to be too solemn about a tale which has here been told for the
whimsical fancy of its unseemliness and because it is probably the
worst that there is to tell, we may here look forward and face the
well-known fact that the unseemliness in talk of rough, rustic boys
flavoured the great President's conversation through life. It is well
to be plain about this. Lincoln was quite without any elegant and
sentimental dissoluteness, such as can be attractively portrayed. His
life was austere and seems to have been so from the start. He had that
shy reverence for womanhood which is sometimes acquired as easily in
rough as in polished surroundings and often quite as steadily
maintained. The testimony of his early companions, along with some
fragments of the boy's feeble but sincere attempts at verse, shows that
he acquired it young. But a large part of the stories and pithy
sayings for which he was famous wherever he went, but of which when
their setting is lost it is impossible to recover the enjoyment, were
undeniably coarse, and naturally enough this fact was jarring to some
of those in America who most revered him. It should not really be
hard, in any comprehensive view of his character and the circumstances
in which it unfolded itself, to trace in this bent of his humour
something not discordant with the widening sympathy and deepening
tenderness of his nature. The words of his political associate in
Illinois, Mr. Leonard Swett, afterwards Attorney-General of the United
States, may suffice. He writes: "Almost any man, who will tell a very
vulgar story, has, in a degree, a vulgar mind. But it was not so with
him; with all his purity of character and exalted morality and
sensibility, which no man can doubt, when hunting for wit he had no
ability to discriminate between the vulgar and refined substances from
which he extracted it. It was the wit he was after, the pure jewel,
and he would pick it up out of the mud or dirt just as readily as from
a parlour table." In any case his best remembered utterances of this
order, when least fit for print, were both wise and incomparably witty,
and in any case they did not prevent grave gentlemen, who marvelled at
them rather uncomfortably, from receiving the deep impression of what
they called his pure-mindedness.

One last recollection of Lincoln's boyhood has appealed, beyond any
other, to some of his friend