If Mr. Lincoln had felt disposed to visit Mr. Beecher for a purpose of this character, he knew very well that the easier and safer and far less embarrassing way was to invite Mr. Beecher to the White House to see him. Beecher was no stranger in Washington at this time and Lincoln had the telegraph wires under his control and did not hesitate to use them when there was need. Beecher made at least one journey to Washington to confer with Lincoln on a matter of editorial policy. His well-known sympathy with the President was such that no explanation need have been made of his taking a train from New York on any day and spending an evening in Washington. A message in the morning would have brought Beecher there by night and no one either in Washington or New York would have thought of it as strange. On the other hand, the absence of the President from Washington at a time as critical as that immediately following the Battle of Bull Run and with no one able to account for his absence from the Capitol or with any knowledge of the errand that had taken him away is well-nigh preposterous. Such an absence might have given rise to the wildest rumors of the President's abduction or murder. Lincoln was too prudent a man, too shrewd and cautious a man, too deeply concerned for the possible effect of so rash and needless a journey; too deeply chagrined over the criticisms of his alleged entering into Washington in disguise at the time of his inauguration, to have done the thing which Mrs. Beecher, when a very old woman, imagined him to have done. Mr. Beecher was editor of _The Christian Union_ and had occasion to write about Abraham Lincoln, and he wrote nothing of this kind. In his sermons and in his lectures he had frequent occasion to mention Lincoln, and no story of this sort is related as having come from him. Mr. Beecher knew too well the homiletic and editorial value of such an incident not to have related it if it had occurred. Someone came to see him one stormy night and the two lingered long together in prayer. For some doubtless good reason Mr. Beecher did not tell his family the name of the man with whom he had spent those earnest hours. Many years afterward, Lincoln and Beecher both being dead, Mrs. Beecher recalled the event and satisfied herself that it was Mr. Lincoln who had come from Washington to see her husband and spend some hours in prayer with him. This is the reasonable explanation, as it seems to me, of an incident which has had rather wide currency but which we are not justified in accepting on the unsupported testimony of even so good a woman as Mrs. Beecher in her old age. An incident of remarkable interest, attested as authentic by two generals of the Civil War, is related by General James F. Rusling, in his _Men and Things in Civil War Days_: