The sense of intimacy with him which they treasured, their conviction that he recognized them as his friends, had little or no trace of familiarity. He was always “Mr. Lincoln” to them, never “Abe,” nor would they tolerate the use of that word. I never saw my Springfield Billy Brown so angrily indignant as in talking of a townsman who affected the name. True, he and Billy were rivals in reminiscence, but that was not the basis of his resentment. “He never called Mr. Lincoln that to his face” was Billy’s complaint. That is, the use of the name gave a false color to the recollections and only truth was tolerable where Mr. Lincoln was concerned. If Mr. Lincoln’s fellowship with the Billy Browns of Illinois was based on his love of sheer human nature, he found in them, too, something very precious to him, and that was a humor that answered his own. The spring from which his humor flowed was strong with native salts and so was theirs. It was naked but clean, devoid of evil insinuation. It was always out-with-it--strong, pungent words; strong, pungent facts. The humor was not in words or facts, it was in what they pointed--the illumination they gave of life and men. Lincoln’s humor was part of his passion for reality, truthfulness, freedom. The Billy Browns answered him and gave him more of a particular kind of salt he craved, in a life in many ways starved, starved for love and hope and gaiety, for all of which he had great natural capacity. The youthfulness of their spirit endeared them to him. They were usually some fifteen or twenty years his junior; but in feeling the difference was greater. Lincoln early looked on himself and spoke of himself as an old man. It was not years--it was burdens, defeats, the failure to find a satisfying purpose in life. He was old, and he craved youth. These men had it. They were perennial children. Youth seemed to warm him, and he sought it wherever it was to be found--in children, boys, young men. They in turn instinctively came to him. A succession of youth in all its forms follows him through his goings and comings in the streets of Springfield, along the route of the old Eighth Circuit of Illinois, through the streets of Washington, into the White House. His own children stirred the deepest passion his unsatisfied heart ever knew. Tad, whose stuttering tongue and restless, valiant spirit brought out all Mr. Lincoln’s tenderness, sat beside him every free evening, going over the pictures and text of the shoals of books which publishers send to a President; he helping the boy’s stumbling tongue to frame his comments--a perfection of fellowship between them. When the nights were not free--and that was often, for there were long conferences running into the small hours, the lad slept beside him on the floor of the conference room. And when it was over, he gathered him up in his arms and himself put him to bed, consoled in the harrowing muddle of affairs by the perfect love between them.