I was born in Illinois in 1838 and have always been a resident of that State. I knew Lincoln, not intimately, but well. I saw, and heard him speak frequently during the years next preceding the Civil War. I knew him before he was a candidate for the presidency, and best during the contest between him and Douglas for the senatorship. It is, I think, well understood that the contest between these two great men was the stepping-stone to the presidency for Lincoln, and gave him to the nation and the world as one of its foremost noble and heroic characters. I knew him later as president, and I am the only person living who was present on the occasion of the first meeting between Lincoln and General U. S. Grant. This meeting took place in the White House on the evening of the eighth of March, 1864, when General Grant came to Washington, escorted by Congressman E. B. Washburn, to receive his commission as Lieutenant-General of the Army. Those present on that occasion, all from Illinois, were Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln, General Grant, Hon. E. B. Washburne, Mr. and Mrs. B. F. James, and myself. In Harper’s Weekly published at that time is a full-page illustration of the presentation of the commission by President Lincoln, in the presence of the members of the cabinet, on the day following the first meeting. The presentation took place at the Capitol. It may not be generally known, but General Grant was the first to enjoy the full rank of Lieutenant-General after Washington; General Winfield Scott having received it by brevet. I was engaged in the Quartermaster’s Department at this time and was on duty in Knoxville, Tenn., and had been sent to Washington to confer with the Quartermaster General, M. C. Meigs. This visit gave me opportunity to see Lincoln under conditions vastly different from those when I had seen him in Illinois. He was, however, the same Lincoln that I had known. If there was a change, it was that he seemed shrunken in stature. He was, however, both in manner and dress, quite in keeping with his exalted station. He was at ease and well poised; nothing in his manner, dress or speech even suggested awkwardness. He had indelibly stamped on his features more than a suggestion of nobility. There were clearly outlined and defined those characteristics that made him famous; that made him the Saviour of his Country and the liberator of a race from bondage. It seems to me, that any representation of Lincoln should, at least, aim to show him as teeming with and, in fact, overflowing with those qualities and characteristics that he was known to possess. On the contrary, the artist has gone far back to his early life, and has sought to represent him even worse than he could have been under the most adverse circumstances. The statue is what the artist seemingly intended it to be—a splendid, a magnificent misrepresentation of Abraham Lincoln as he was _in the later years of his life_, for it reverts to what he