At Cleveland the party remained over for a day, and Lincoln was greeted with the usual friendly enthusiasm. An immense crowd met him at the depot, and he was escorted to the Weddell House, where a reception was given him in the evening. Hon. A.G. Riddle, then a resident of Cleveland, and a newly elected member of the Congress which was to share with Lincoln the burdens and responsibilities of the Civil War, was present on that occasion, and furnishes the following interesting personal recollections of it: "I saw Abraham Lincoln for the first time, at the Weddell House that evening. He stood on the landing-place at the top of a broad stairway, and the crowd approached him from below. This gave him an exaggerated advantage of his six feet four inches of length. The shapelessness of the lathy form, the shock of coarse black hair surmounting the large head, the retreating forehead--these were not apparent where we stood. My heart sprang up to him--the coming man. Of the thousand times I afterward saw him, the first view remains the most distinct impression; and never again to me was he more imposing. As we approached, someone whispered of me to him; he took my hand in both his for an instant, and we wheeled into the already crowded rooms. His manner was strongly Western; his speech and pronunciation Southwestern. Wholly without self-consciousness with men, he was constrained and ill at ease when surrounded, as he several times was, by fashionably dressed ladies. One incident of the evening I particularly recall. Ab McElrath was in the crowd--a handsome giant, an Apollo in youth, of about Mr. Lincoln's height. What brought it about, I do not know; but I saw them standing back to back, in a contest of altitude--Mr. Lincoln and Ab McElrath--the President-elect, the chosen, the nation's leader in the thick-coming darkness, and the tavern-keeper and fox-hunter. The crowd applauded.