the
great sorrow and disappointment that I felt. He placed a hand upon
my shoulder, and said: "Never mind, my boy; it will all come
right." I believe that he then felt certain that the position he
took in that memorable debate would make him the logical candidate
of the Republican party for the Presidency in 1860, which it did.
And two years from that very day the Republican party celebrated
its first national victory in his election as President of the
United States.

It has been said that Mr. Lincoln never went to school; and he
never did to any great extent, but in a broad sense of the word,
he was an educated man. He was a student, a thinker; he educated
himself, and mastered any question which claimed his attention.
There was no man in this country who possessed to a greater degree
the power of analyzation.

He was a student all his life. One incident that occurred in
Springfield, some years before he finally left, will serve as an
illustration.

An old German came through the town and claimed that he could teach
us all to read and speak German in a few weeks. A class was
organized for the purpose of studying German. Lincoln became a
member of the class, and I also was in it, and I can see him yet
going about with the German book in his pocket, studying it during
his leisure moments in court and elsewhere. None of the rest of
us learned much, but Lincoln mastered it, as he did every other
subject which engaged his attention.

His home life was a pleasant one. I often visited at his home,
and so far as my observation went, I do not hesitate to say that
not the slightest credence should be given to the many false stories
that have from time to time appeared, manufactured largely by those
who desired to write something new and sensational concerning the
life of President Lincoln in his home, and concerning Mrs. Lincoln.

Mr. Lincoln was regarded generally as an ungainly man, and so he
was; and yet on occasions he appeared to me to be superior in
dignity and nobility to almost any other man whom I have ever seen.
I was present when the committee from the National Convention, that
gave his first nomination for President, came to Springfield to
notify him of his nomination. He stood in the rear of a double
parlor in his home, and as the Hon. George F. Ashmun, president of
the convention, presented the members of the delegation one by one
to him, I thought that he looked what he was--the superior of any