dress on the battlefield of Gettysburg?"

"Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this
continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a
great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived
and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of
that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final
resting place for those who gave their lives that that nation might
live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in
a larger sense we cannot dedicate--we cannot consecrate--we cannot
hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here
have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The
world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here--but it can
never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be
dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have
thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to
the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take
increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full
measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve, that these dead shall
not have died in vain--that this nation under God shall have a new birth
of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people and for the
people, shall not perish from the earth."

It was during the dark days of the war that he wrote this simple letter
of sympathy to a bereaved mother:--

"I have been shown, in the files of the War Department, a statement that
you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of
battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which
should attempt to beguile you from your grief for a loss so overwhelming,
but I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation which may be
found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our
Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave
you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn
pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the
altar of Freedom."

_November_ 21.--Abbie Clark and her cousin Cora came to call and invited
me and her soldier cousin to come to dinner to-night, at Mrs.
Thompson's. He will be here this afternoon and I will give him