"The first time I remember to have seen Abraham Lincoln was during the memorable campaign of 1840, when I was a boy fifteen years of age. It was at an immense Whig mass-meeting held at Springfield, Illinois, in the month of June of that year. The Whigs attended this meeting from all parts of the State in large numbers, and it was estimated that from forty to fifty thousand people were present. They came in carriages and wagons, on horseback and on foot. They came with log cabins drawn on wheels by oxen, and with coons, coon-skins, and hard cider. They came with music and banners; and thousands of them came from long distances. It was the first political meeting I had ever attended, and it made a very strong impression upon my youthful mind. "My father, William H. Henderson, then a resident of Stark County, Illinois, was an ardent Whig; and having served under General William Henry Harrison, the then Whig candidate for President, in the war of 1812-1815, he felt a deep interest in his election. And although he lived about a hundred miles from Springfield, he went with a delegation from Stark County to this political meeting, and took me along with him. I remember that at this great meeting of the supporters of Harrison and Tyler there were a number of able and distinguished speakers of the Whig party of the State of Illinois present. Among them were Colonel E.D. Baker, who was killed at Ball's Bluff, on the Potomac, in the late war, and who was one of the most eloquent speakers in the State; Colonel John J. Hardin, who was killed at the battle of Buena Vista, in the Mexican War; Fletcher Webster, a son of Daniel Webster, who was killed in the late war; S. Leslie Smith, a brilliant orator of Chicago; Rev. John Hogan, Ben Bond, and Abraham Lincoln. I heard all of these men speak on that occasion. And while I was too young to be a judge of their speeches, yet I thought them all to be great men, and none of them greater than Abraham Lincoln." One of the most prominent members of the Illinois bar has written out especially for this work his impressions of Lincoln's speech at that gathering. [Illustration: ABRAHAM LINCOLN IN 1861. From a photograph by Klauber of Louisville, Kentucky. From a photograph owned by Mr. James B. Speed of Louisville, Kentucky, to whose courtesy we owe the right to reproduce it here. When Lincoln was visiting Joshua F. Speed in 1841, Mrs. Speed, the mother of his friend, became much interested in him. His melancholy was profound, and she tried by kindness and gentleness to arouse him to new interest in life. One day before his departure she asked one of her daughters for the latter's Oxford Bible, telling her she wanted it for Mr. Lincoln, and promising to get another in its place. The gift touched Lincoln deeply, and after he became President he remembered the giver with the above portrait--one he had had taken especially for her, he wrote.]