happy while she is otherwise." Very significantly he has inquired of friends how that one enjoyed a trip on the new railway cars to Jacksonville, and--not being like Falkland in "The Rivals"--praises God that she has enjoyed it exceedingly. This was in the spring of 1842. Some three months later he writes again to Speed: "I must gain confidence in my own ability to keep my resolves when they are made. In that ability I once prided myself as the only chief gem of my character. That gem I lost how and where you know too well. I have not regained it, and until I do I cannot trust myself in any matter of much importance. I believe now that, had you understood my case at the time as well as I understood yours afterwards, by the aid you would have given me I should have sailed through clear. . . . I always was superstitious. I believe God made me one of the instruments of bringing Fanny and you together, which union I have no doubt He had fore-ordained. Whatever He designs for me He will do. 'Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord,' is my text just now. If, as you say, you have told Fanny all, I should have no objection to her seeing this letter. I do not think I can come to Kentucky this season. I am so poor and make so little headway in the world that I drop back in a month of idleness as much as I gain in a year's sowing." At last in the autumn of that year Lincoln addresses to Speed a question at once so shrewd and so daringly intimate as perhaps no other man ever asked of his friend. "The immense sufferings you endured from the first days of September till the middle of February" (the date of Speed's wedding) "you never tried to conceal from me, and I well understood. You have now been the husband of a lovely woman nearly eight months. That you are happier now than the day you married her I well know. . . . But I want to ask a close question! 'Are you in _feeling_ as well as in _judgment_ glad you are married as you are?' From anybody but me this would be an impudent question, not to be tolerated, but I know you will pardon it in me. Please answer it quickly, as I am impatient to know." Speed remained in Kentucky; Lincoln was too poor for visits of pleasure; and Speed was not a man who cared for political life; but the memorials, from which the above quotations have been taken, of Lincoln's lasting friendship with Speed and his kind mother, who gave Lincoln a treasured Bible, and his kind young wife, who made her husband's friend her own, and whose violet, dropped into her husband's letter to him just as he was sealing it, was among the few flowers that Lincoln ever appreciated, throw the clearest light that we can anywhere obtain on the inner mind of Lincoln.