The Republican Convention at Chicago verified Mrs. Lincoln’s prophecy of being the wife of a President. It assembled the 16th of June, 1860, and after a close contest between the two favorites of the Republican party—Governor Seward and Mr. Lincoln—the latter was declared unanimously nominated as a candidate for the Presidency. In Springfield, Mrs. Lincoln waited in her own home for the result of her prediction, and when at noon the cannon on the public square announced the decision of the Convention, breathless with expectancy, she scarcely dared to ask the result. Her husband, in the excitement of the moment, did not forget her, but putting the telegram in his pocket, remarked to his friends that “there was a little woman on Eighth street who had some interest in the matter,” walked home to gladden her heart with the good news. That Friday night must have been the very happiest of her life, for few women have ever craved the position as she did, and it was hers! Crowds of citizens and strangers thronged her home all the afternoon, and the roar of cannon and the wild, tumultuous shouts of excited men filled the town with a deafening noise. At night the Republicans marched in a body to Mr. Lincoln’s house, and, after a brief speech, were invited, as many as could get into the house, to enter, “the crowd responding that after the fourth of March they would give him a larger house. The people did not retire until a late hour, and then moved off reluctantly, leaving the excited household to their rest.” And now commenced the life which Mrs. Lincoln had so long anticipated, and if her husband was not elated, she was, and the hearts of these two, so nearly concerned in this great honor, beat from widely different emotions. “He could put on none of the airs of eminence; he could place no bars between himself and those who had honored him. Men who entered his house impressed with a sense of his new dignities, found him the same honest, affectionate, true-hearted and simple-minded Abraham Lincoln that he had always been. He answered his own bell, accompanied his visitors to the door when they retired, and felt all that interfered with his old homely and hearty habits of hospitality as a burden—almost an impertinence.” She, annoyed by the crowds who thronged the house, and the constant interruptions, found it so intolerable that Mr. Lincoln took a room in the State House, and met his friends there until his departure for Washington. Mrs. Lincoln was not greatly inclined to observe the requirements of her social position, and she thereby lost opportunities of advancing her husband’s interests of which she perhaps was unaware. She did not rightly estimate the importance of conciliatory address with friend and foe alike, and seemed not conscious of the immense assistance which, as the wife of a public man, she had it in her power to give her husband. And this was all the more singular for the reason that she was very ambitious.