Judge Weldon, of the Court of Claims, remembers the first time he heard him repeat it. "It was during a term of court, in the same year, at Lincoln, a little town named for Mr. Lincoln. We were all stopping at the hotel, which had a very big room with four beds, called the lawyers' room. Some of us thin fellows doubled up; but I remember that Judge Davis, who was as large then as he was afterwards, when a Justice of the Supreme Bench, always had a bed to himself. Mr. Lincoln was an early riser, and one morning, when up early, as usual, and dressed, he sat before the big old-fashioned fireplace and repeated aloud from memory that whole hymn. Somebody asked him for the name of the author; but he said he had never been able to learn who wrote it, but wished he knew. There were a great many guesses, and some said that Shakespeare must have written it. But Mr. Lincoln, who was better read in Shakespeare than any of us, said that they were not Shakespeare's words. I made a persistent hunt for the author, and years after found the hymn was written by an Englishman, William Knox, who was born in 1789 and died in 1825." All his life Lincoln was a temperance man. His first essay was a plea for temperance. His second was a eulogy of the Declaration of Independence. He belonged to the Sons of Temperance in Springfield, and frequently made temperance speeches. Judge Weldon remembers that he was once in Mr. Douglas's room at Springfield when Lincoln entered, and, following the custom, Mr. Douglas produced a bottle and some glasses and asked his callers to join him in a drink. Lincoln declined on the ground that for thirty years he had been a temperance man and was too old to change. Leonard Swett says,-- "He told me not more than a year before he was elected President that he had never tasted liquor in his life. 'What!' I said, 'Do you mean to say that you never tasted it?' 'Yes,' he replied, 'I never tasted it.'" In one of his speeches is found this assertion: "Reasonable men have long since agreed that intemperance is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of all evils of mankind." Mr. C. C. Coffin, a famous newspaper writer of that time, who accompanied the notification committee from the Chicago Convention to Springfield, related in his newspaper a few days later an incident that occurred on that occasion. He says that after the exchange of formalities Lincoln said,-- "'Mrs. Lincoln will be pleased to see you, gentlemen. You will find her in the other room. You must be thirsty after your long ride. You will find a pitcher of water in the library.'