Lincoln had one anguished hour with her in a brief return to consciousness. It was in the living-room of a pioneer log-cabin, untouched by grace or beauty; homely, useful things about them, the light on her face coming through a clapboard door open to the sun and wind of an unspoiled landscape. The houses of the wealthiest farmers were seldom more than two big rooms and a sleeping loft, and privacy the rarest, most difficult privilege. Her stricken family was in the kitchen, or out of doors, to give them this hour of parting alone. What was said between them is unrecorded. When she fell into a coma, Lincoln stumbled out of that death-chamber like a soul gone blind and groping. Two days later Ann Rutledge died. As a pebble falling from a peak in the Alps may start an avalanche on its path of destruction, so one man’s unconsidered sin may devastate many lives. The tragedy shocked the country for twenty miles around. It had the elements and proportions of a classic tale, so that to-day, when it is three-quarters of a century gone by, the great-grandchildren of those who witnessed it speak of it with hushed voices. Lincoln’s mission and martyrdom imbued it with those fates that invest old Greek drama. James Rutledge died three months later, at the age of fifty-four, it was currently believed of a broken heart.[2] The ambitious young brother David, who was to have been Lincoln’s partner, died soon after being admitted to the bar. The Rutledge farm was broken up, the family scattered. Lincoln came to the verge of madness. [2] Ida M. Tarbell’s “Early Life of Lincoln.” A week after the funeral William G. Greene found him wandering in the woods along the river, muttering to himself. His mind was darkened, stunned by the blow. He sat for hours in a brooding melancholy that his friends feared would end in suicidal mania. Although some one always kept a watchful eye upon him, he sometimes succeeded in slipping away to the lonely country burying ground, seven miles distant. There he would be found with one arm across her grave, reading his little pocket Testament. This was the only book he opened for months. All that long autumn he noticed nothing. He was entirely docile, pitifully like a child who waits to be told what to do. Aunt Nancy kept him busy about the house, cutting wood for her, picking apples, digging potatoes, even holding her yarn; the men took him off to the fields to shock and husk corn. All of them tried, by constant physical employment, to relieve the pressure on his clouded mind, love leading them to do instinctively what the wisest doctors do to-day. In the evenings he sat outside the family circle, sunk in a brown study from which it was difficult to rouse him. It was a long and terrible strain to those devoted friends who protected and loved him in that anxious, critical time. Not until the first storm of December was there any change.