The first thing he said was, “I do love an open fire; I always had one to home.” The homely phrase “to home!” How near it seemed to bring him! Like all the other common expressions he used, it only made us love him more! His advisers used sometimes to try to get him to write in a more polished manner, but he would say, “Well, it may not be so elegant or classical, but the people will understand it, the people will understand it!” And they always did. Mrs. Stowe could hardly have been more effectually made to feel “to home” than she was. In response to the President’s humorous remark about her book, Mrs. Stowe no doubt answered, as she so many times did, by disclaiming any intention to do anything except to obey the inner voice that commanded her to write. “I did not write it, not I myself alone,” she always said. “It seemed to me that God himself made me write it, that I wrote it at his dictation.” And Lincoln, from the depths of his profoundly reverent nature, probably answered that he could understand how that could be said with all simplicity and true worship. Gazing into that homely, noble, pain-marked face, and knowing so well how many reasons there were for its look of inexpressible sadness, her heart was touched with a great pity for him as a man. After they had talked for a few moments, some one came through the room and spoke with him for a little while; then in passing out the visitor said casually, “Where do you dine?” The President answered, “Well, I don’t dine; I just browse around a little now and then.” To the woman that sat there waiting and letting nothing escape her eye, there was something irresistibly pathetic in the tone in which this was spoken. Where indeed could President Lincoln find an hour of rest in the midst of his overweighted days? The whole city was one hospital of wounded soldiers, the borders outside were one vast camp looking for battle. Even the Emancipation Proclamation, that one firm stone in the wide morass of despondency on which the wearied man at last had set firm foothold, did not just now seem to lead toward the land of promise. Struggling with an extraordinarily difficult problem, he was at that moment misunderstood on all sides. People criticized him for what he did and for what he did not do. He was too hasty, he was too slow. They called him stupid blockhead, satyr, ape, gorilla. They named his military plans imbecility; his humor they took for irreverence. But Mrs. Stowe understood him, and she somehow struck the note at the beginning which made them at home with each other. If this had not been the case, he would never have said the things to her that we know he did say.