_From a photograph by Alexander Hesler, Chicago, 1858._] Six years have passed. The gardens of Washington are bursting into bloom. The sky is purple under a clear sun. It is Wednesday morning, the 19th of April, 1865. All the bells are tolling, and the whole city is robed in black. At eleven o'clock some sixty clergymen enter the White House, followed by the governors of the States. At noon comes the long procession of Government officers, followed by the diplomatic corps. In the sable rooms rises a dark catafalque, and in it lies a waxen face. Toll!--the bells of Washington, Georgetown, and Alexandria! Minute-guns boom. Around that dead face the representatives of the nation, and of all nations, pass, and tears fall like rain. A funeral car of flowers moves through the streets. Abraham Lincoln has done his work. He is on his journey back to the scenes of his childhood! The boy who defended the turtles, the man who stretched out his arm over the defenseless Indian in the Black Hawk War, and who freed the slave; the man of whom no one ever asked pity in vain--he is going back to the prairies, to sleep his eternal sleep among the violets. Toll! The bells of all the cities and towns of the loyal nation are tolling. In every principal church in all the land people have met to weep and to pray. Half-mast flags everywhere meet the breeze. They laid the body beneath the rotunda of the Capitol, amid the April flowers and broken magnolias. Then homeward--through Baltimore, robed in black; through Philadelphia, through New York, Cleveland, Indianapolis, and Chicago. The car rolls on, over flowers and under black flags, amid the tolling of the bells of cities and the bells of the simple country church-towers. All labor ceases. The whole people stop to wonder and to weep. The dirges cease. The muffled drums are still. The broken earth of the prairies is wrapped around the dead commoner, the fallen apostle of humanity, the universal brother of all who toil and struggle. The courts of Europe join in the lamentation. Never yet was a man wept like this man. His monument ennobles the world. He stands in eternal bronze in a hundred cities. And why? Because he had a heart to feel; because to him all men had been brothers of equal blood and birthright; and because he had had faith that "RIGHT MAKES MIGHT." CHAPTER XXV. AT THE LAST. From the magnolias to the Northern orchards, from the apple-blooms to the prairie violets! The casket was laid in the tomb. Twilight came; the multitudes had gone. It was ended now, and night was falling. Two forms stood beside the closed door of the tomb; one was an old, gray-haired woman, the other was a patriarchal-looking man. The woman's gray hairs blew about her white face like silver threads, and she pushed it back with her withered hand.