And when you subtracts things, when if you have two things and you takes one away, only one remains." "Is dat 'rithmetic?" "Yah." "Well, 'tain't true, den. It's no good!" Here a dispute arose, when Jim said, "Now, you 'spose three pigeons sit on that fence, and somebody shoot one of dem; do t'other two stay dar? I guess not! dey flies away quickern odder feller falls." And, Professor, trifling as the story seems, it illustrates the arithmetic you must use in estimating the actual losses resulting from our great battles. The statements you have referred to give the killed, wounded, and missing at the first roll-call after the battle, which always exhibits a greatly exaggerated total, especially in the column of missing.'" Mr. Goldwin Smith, the gentleman referred to in the foregoing anecdote, has summarized his impressions of Lincoln in the following paragraph: "Such a person as Abraham Lincoln is quite unknown to our official circles or to those of Continental nations. Indeed, I think his place in history will be unique. He has not been trained to diplomacy or administrative affairs, and is in all respects one of the people. But how wonderfully he is endowed and equipped for the performance of the duties of the chief executive officer of the United States at this time! The precision and minuteness of his information on all questions to which we referred was a succession of surprises to me." Still terser, but hardly less expressive, is Emerson's characterization of Lincoln as one who had been "permitted to do more for America than any other American man." A striking passage by Mr. Norman Hapgood should have place among these tributes. "Lincoln had no artificial aids. He merely proved the weapon of finest temper in the fire in which he was tested. In the struggle for survival in a national upheaval, he not only proved the living power of integrity and elasticity, but he easily combined with his feats of strength and shrewdness some of the highest flights of taste. As we look back across the changes of his life,--see him passing over the high places and the low, and across the long stretches of the prairie; spending years in the Socratic arguments of the tavern, and anon holding the rudder of state in grim silence; choosing jests which have the freshness of earth, and principles of eternal right; judging potentates and laborers in the clear light of nature, and at ease with both; alone by virtue of a large and melancholy soul, at home with every man by virtue of love and faith,--this figure takes its place high in our minds and hearts, not solely through the natural right of strength and success, but also because his strength is ours, and the success won by him rested on the fundamental purity and health of the popular will of which he was the leader and the servant. Abraham Lincoln was in a deep and lasting sense the first American."