Then perhaps in this interview with its high emotional tension there may have come a moment when personal things could be mentioned, for I do not know how otherwise to account for the great confidence he reposed in her in one of the things that he said in that interview. Perhaps the way may have been opened by her saying something about her own feelings in writing “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” She may have told him how acutely she suffered when she was working on that book. Elsewhere she has said, “Many times, in writing ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ I thought my health would fail me utterly, but I prayed earnestly that God would help me till I got through, and still I was pressed beyond measure and above strength.” Something of this sort she doubtless told Mr. Lincoln. To this the President must have listened with full understanding. “It lies like lead on my heart,” she would continue. “It shadows my life with sorrow. The more so since I feel for the south as for my own brothers, and am pained for every horror I have been obliged to describe, as one who is forced by an awful oath to disclose in court some family disgrace. Many times I have thought I must die, and yet I pray God that I may live to see the end of this struggle.” These are the words of Mrs. Stowe; if she used the same words in speaking with President Lincoln it would surely be in response that he must have said what we know he did say in some part of this conversation, that he did not think that it would be given to him to rejoice in the successful outcome of the great rebellion. “Whichever way it ends, I have the impression that I shan’t last long after it is over,” was what he said. Mrs. Stowe afterwards said that she felt that no man had suffered more or more deeply than he, although it was a dry, weary, patient pain that seemed to some like insensibility, but was not--Oh, never was at all! After he was gone his countrymen understood this perfectly. Mrs. Stowe understood it then. She said, “When we have passed through this trouble we shall think that no private or individual sorrow can ever make us wholly comfortless. If my faith in God’s presence and living power in the affairs of men ever grows dim, that thought shall make it impossible for me to doubt.”