On the way up from Washington, the President had sat in a sad abstraction. He took little part in the talk that buzzed about him. Once, when MacVeagh was vehemently declaiming about the way the Southern magnates were misleading the Southern masses, Lincoln said with a weary smile one of those sayings of his which will never be forgotten. "You can fool part of the people all the time; you can fool all the people part of the time; but you can't fool all the people all the time." Then he became silent again. He did not know what he was to say on the morrow. The chief oration was to be by Edward Everett of Massachusetts, a trained orator, fluent and finished in polished phrase. He had been Governor of Massachusetts, Minister to England, Secretary of State, United States Senator. He was handsome, distinguished, graceful. The ungainly President felt that he and his words would be but a foil to Everett and his sonorous sentences, sentences that were sure to come rolling in like "the surge and thunder of the Odyssey." Everett had graduated from Harvard, Lincoln from a log-cabin. Both must face on the morrow the same audience. The President searched his pockets and found the stub of a pencil. From the aisle of the car, he picked up a piece of brown wrapping paper, thrown there by Seward, who had just opened a package of books in the opposite seat. He penciled a few words, bent his head upon his great knotted hand in thought, then penciled a few more. Then he struck out some words and added others, read his completed task and did not find it good. He shook his head, stuffed the brown wrapping paper into his pocket, and took up again his interrupted talk with MacVeagh. At eleven the next morning, from an open-air platform on the battlefield, Everett held the vast audience through two hours of fervent speech, fervent with patriotism, fervent also with bitterness against the men he called "the Southern rebels." His speech was literature and his voice was music. As the thunder of his peroration ended a thunderstorm of applause began. When it, too, died away, there shambled to the front of the platform an ungainly, badly dressed man, contrasting sharply and in every way disadvantageously with Everett of the silver tongue. This man's tongue betrayed him too. He tried to pitch his voice to reach all that vast audience and his first words came in a squeaking falsetto. A titter ran through the crowd. Lincoln stopped speaking. There were a few seconds of painful silence. Then he came to his own. With a voice enriched by a passionate sincerity, he began again and finished his Gettysburg speech. Here it is: