This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1890 edition. Excerpt: ...He was a man, in fact, especially liable to legend. We have been told by farmers in Central Illinois that the brown thrush did not sing for a year after he died. He was gentle and merciful, and therefore he seems in a cer tain class of annals to have passed all his time in Ch. xvm. soothing misfortune and ...
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1890 edition. Excerpt: ...He was a man, in fact, especially liable to legend. We have been told by farmers in Central Illinois that the brown thrush did not sing for a year after he died. He was gentle and merciful, and therefore he seems in a cer tain class of annals to have passed all his time in Ch. xvm. soothing misfortune and pardoning crime. He had more than his share of the shrewd native humor, and therefore the loose jest-books of two centuries have been ransacked for anecdotes to be attributed to him. He was a great and powerful lover of mankind, especially of those not favored by fortune. One night he had a dream, which he repeated the next morning to the writer of these lines, which quaintly illustrates his unpretending and kindly democracy. He was in some great assembly; the people made a lane to let him pass. "He is a common-looking fellow," some one said. Lincoln in his dream turned to his critic and replied, in his Quaker phrase, "Friend, the Lord prefers commonlooking people: that is why he made so many of them." He that abases himself shall be exalted. Because Lincoln kept himself in such constant sympathy with the common people, whom he respected too highly to flatter or mislead, he was rewarded by a reverence and a love hardly ever given to a human being. Among the humble working people of the South whom he had made free, this veneration and affection easily passed into the supernatural. At a religious meeting among the negroes of the Sea Islands a young man expressed the wish that he might see Lincoln. A gray-headed negro rebuked the rash aspiration: "No man see Linkum. Linkum walk as Jesus walk--no man see Linkum."i But leaving aside these fables, which are a natural enough expression of a popular awe and love, 1 Mr. Hay had this story from Captain E....
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