After a night by the grave of his dead, Abe Lincoln set out at twilight of the second day to visit the places where she who seemed yet living had lived. Turning his face toward New Salem he made his way slowly along the well-known roadway to the place where he had dropped his bundle and listened on a never-to-be-forgotten night to a sweet voice singing on the heights. Then he had been a friendly stranger in New Salem. How fast the years had gone. What long and patient waiting and what fulness of joy had been their measure. But now the cup was bitter to the brim with the stupefying potion of dead hope and the gall of human loss. In the shadow of the bluff he paused. He moved nearer the bluff, raised his face and, with a feverish expectancy, listened. As he stood the drowsy stillness was broken by the far, faint tinkle of a cow-bell. For a moment the mirage of hope set his heart beating with spasmodic joy. It was all a fearful dream--all a heart crushing unreality. She was yet up on the heights, alive, glad, singing and shouting. He listened, even straining his ear for the first notes of her glad, free song. As if she were not yet beyond sound of his voice he called: "Ann! Ann!" Again he listened intently. The gray of twilight deepened. The dim music of the far-away bell dissolved itself in a pervading hush, and all was still. In a voice suggesting the pain of a fresh blow, the man in the shadow whispered with upturned face, "Ann! Ann!" The whisper, too, was gathered into the all-enveloping gloom and silence. He went a little farther on, the soft music of water running over stones came to his ear. It was the stream in the schoolroom where ferns had been books and God had been the teacher. Mechanically he turned toward it. The swollen stream across which he had carried Ann on a night not so long ago was smaller now. He stepped across. The gray of the open road deepened in the fern-dell into gloom. But no light was needed to bring to the vision of the man the picture of one he yet sought in the land of the living. Again he saw her with the sun-shine falling over the red-gold tresses of her wreath-bound hair as she sat on the ledge of rock. Again he heard her voice but he was too numb now to remember its message. Groping his way to the stone, he knelt beside it and spread his hands over the place where she had sat. His fingers came in contact with dead leaves. Feeling along the way they lay he found the wreath, yet there, that had been a crown on May day. Lifting it gently he cried: "Oh, Ann! Ann! It cannot be. You have not gone away forever! You will come back to me! We will have our little home! Oh, Ann! Ann!" His pleading voice ended in a groan. He dropped his face against the faded leaves. How long he remained by the rock and the wreath he did not know. After a time, like a crushed and wounded animal, he crept from the place and proceeded on his way toward the village.