On the whole the earthen vessel in which he carried his treasure of clear thought and clean feelings appears to have enhanced its flavour. There was at any rate nothing outward about him that aroused the passion of envy. A few peculiarly observant men were immediately impressed with his distinction, but there is no doubt that to the ordinary stranger he appeared as a very odd fish. "No portraits that I have ever seen," writes one, "do justice to the awkwardness and ungainliness of his figure." Its movements when he began to speak rather added to its ungainliness, and, though to a trained actor his elocution seemed perfect, his voice when he first opened his mouth surprised and jarred upon the hearers with a harsh note of curiously high pitch. But it was the sort of oddity that arrests attention, and people's attention once caught was apt to be held by the man's transparent earnestness. Soon, as he lost thought of himself in his subject, his voice and manner changed; deeper notes, of which friends record the beauty, rang out, the sad eyes kindled, and the tall, gaunt figure, with the strange gesture of the long, uplifted arms, acquired even a certain majesty. Hearers recalled afterwards with evident sincerity the deep and instantaneous impression of some appeal to simple conscience, as when, "reaching his hands towards the stars of that still night," he proclaimed, "in some things she is certainly not my equal, but in her natural right to eat the bread that she has earned with the sweat of her brow, she is my equal, and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of any man." Indeed, upon a sympathetic audience, already excited by the occasion, he could produce an effect which the reader of his recorded speeches would hardly believe. Of his speech at an early state convention of the Republican party there is no report except that after a few sentences every reporter laid down his pen for the opposite of the usual reason, and, as he proceeded, "the audience arose from their chairs and with pale faces and quivering lips pressed unconsciously towards him." And of his speech on another similar occasion several witnesses seem to have left descriptions hardly less incongruous with English experience of public meetings. If we credit him with these occasional manifestations of electric oratory--as to which it is certain that his quiet temperament did at times blaze out in a surprising fashion--it is not to be thought that he was ordinarily what could be called eloquent; some of his speeches are commonplace enough, and much of his debating with Douglas is of a drily argumentative kind that does honour to the mass meetings which heard it gladly. But the greatest gift of the orator he did possess; the personality behind the words was felt. "Beyond and above all skill," says the editor of a great paper who heard him at Peoria, "was the overwhelming conviction imposed upon the audience that the speaker