On the 22d of February, 1861, Abraham Lincoln, scheduled to pass on from Harrisburg, where he made a speech as arranged, instead of waiting to depart by the morning train, sped to Philadelphia and thence by a special train detained for "a military messenger with a parcel," to Washington, by the regular midnight train. The news of his arrival at the capital by this unexpected and clandestine route, and in disguise--this was denied--of a Scotch cap and plaid shawl, startled everybody. Rumors of an attempt to make mischief, as he called it, were rife. But the public still took things as quake-proof, and Mr. Lincoln assured his audiences, as he spoke at every city on his way, that "the crisis was artificial." On the evening of the twenty-third, the writer dropped into the Broadway negro minstrel hall. Newspaper men knew that Unsworth introduced the latest skimming of the press into his burlesque lecture and liked to hear his funny versions and perversions. The comic sheet of the metropolis, _Vanity Fair_, enframing the witty scintillations of "Artemus Ward," George Arnold, and a brilliant band, complained that this "nigger comedian" used or anticipated their best effusions. On the whole the public saw in the surreptitious flight of the ruler into his due seat only a farce, in keeping with his jesting humor--he was regarded as a Don Quixote in figure, but a Sancho Panza, for his philosophic proverbs, widely retailed and considered opportune. So the indignation proper toward the forced escapade was absent; everybody still mocked at the "terrible plots," as so much stale quail, and when the blackened-face orator, coming to a pause after enunciation of his "That's what's the matter" looked around wistfully, the audience were agog. Suddenly out of the wing an attendant darted with alarmed manner and face. He carried on his arm a shawl, gray and travel-stained, and in one shaking hand a Scotch bonnet. Unsworth snatched them in hot haste and fright, clapped on the cap, and, draping himself in the plaid, rushed off at the side, forgetting his own high silk hat. This, with the black suit, the orthodox lecturer's, now gave him a resemblance to Mr. Lincoln, not previously perceived, for they were men of opposite shapes. The eclipse brought home to the spectators the ludicrousness of the President entering his capital in secret, but, I repeat, no one felt any shame, and the audience went forth to relate the excellent finish to the parody, at home or in the saloons, to hearers as obtuse as themselves, to the seriousness of the episode. Somehow, so far, the elect from Illinois was ever the Western buffoon. But when, in his inaugural address, Lincoln thundered the new keynote, the veil fell: "In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, is the momentous issue of the Civil War."