Some one called out and asked if Grace Bedell was in the crowd that surged around the train. Far back in the crowd the way began to open and a beautiful little girl came forward, timid but happy, to speak to the President-elect, who was also happy to show her that he had taken her advice and begun to grow a beard. The little girl was lifted up to him. He took her in his arms and tenderly kissed her forehead in the midst of the enthusiastic approval of a cheering multitude. But the story ran the rounds of the East as the uncouth conduct of a backwoods demagogue. As Europe got its idea of the new President from the New York and New England papers, he was believed by foreign leaders to be the proof of degenerate democracy and the failure of popular government. Throughout the war there was lavished upon him an unceasing tirade of caricature and lampoon. But they had been deceived. The shock of his assassination seemed to tear off the veil that blinded their eyes, and since then all the scholarship of Europe has analyzed his career as showing one of the great characters of the world. History finds that he was a prophet of ideal humanity, the farthest possible from despotic sovereignties. Dynastic states can never fight for a democratic government merely to preserve it, and democracies can never fight merely to preserve a party in power. It may very well be doubted that the North could have won the Civil War if there had not been involved the moral issues of human slavery. England would surely have intervened for the starving workers of their cottonmills, but the workers refused to have their cause supported by fastening slavery upon any part of the human race. [Illustration: Lincoln Statue--Chicago, Illinois.] III. HOMELY WAYS TO EXPRESS TRUTH The way Lincoln looked at the malicious denunciations of his conduct of the war, the vile stories told about him and the wicked perversions of the things he said was once characterized by him in the story of an incident that happened to two Irish emigrants who had come out into the wilderness fresh from the Emerald Isle. They were tramping their way through the West seeking for work. One evening they camped at the edge of a pond of water. Being tired, they were soon fast asleep. Suddenly they were awakened by a chorus of bellowing sounds the like of which they had never heard before. It was not comparable to anything they knew of man or beasts. Baum, gurgle and bellow it went here, there, and then seemingly everywhere. They grabbed their walking-stick shillelahs, ready to face the enemy, whether man, beast or devil. But nothing was to be seen. They crept forward, then boldly searched, strained their eyes in every direction and defied their enemy with many insulting challenges to show himself, but the scattering bellowing was all that could be found. At last a happy thought struck one of them. "Jamie," he cried to his companion, "I know what it is! It's nothing but a noise."