The Cabinet were often annoyed at the obtrusion of the President’s taste for a joke at what seemed to them inopportune moments--especially Secretary Stanton, whose sense of humor was not keen. On September 22, 1862, they were peremptorily summoned to a meeting at the White House. They found the President reading a book, from which he barely looked up till all were in their seats. Then he said: “Gentlemen, did you ever read anything from Artemus Ward? Let me read you a chapter which is very funny.” When the reading was finished, he laughed heartily, looking around the circle for a response, but nobody even smiled; if any countenance revealed anything, it was irritation. “Well,” said he, “let’s have another chapter;” and he suited action to word. Finding his listeners no more sympathetic than before, he threw the book down with a deep sigh and exclaimed: “Gentlemen, why don’t you laugh? With the fearful strain that is on me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die, and you need this medicine as much as I do.” With that, he ran his hand down into his tall hat, which sat on the table near him, and drew forth a sheet of paper, from which he read aloud, with the most impressive emphasis, the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation. “If any of you have any suggestions to make as to the form of this paper or its composition,” said he, “I shall be glad to hear them. But”--and the deliberateness with which he pronounced the next words left no doubt that the die had already been cast--“this paper is to issue!” The Lincolns brought two young children with them into the White House, both boys. Of the elder, Willie, we hear little, except that he died there, and that his loss added one more to the many lines which the war had worn into the brow of his father. The younger boy, “Tad,” is better known to the public through the exploitation of his juvenile pranks by the newspapers and his appearance in some of the President’s portraits. Many stories are told of his fondness for bringing ragged urchins from the streets into the kitchen and feeding them, to the sore distress of the cook and sometimes to the disturbance of the domestic routine in other ways; but for whatever he wished to do in the charitable line he found his father a faithful ally. There is a pretty tale of his having espied in the lower corridor of the White House, one very rainy day, a young man and woman, rather shabbily dressed, who seemed depressed in spirits and anxious to consult with some one. Tad called his father’s attention to them, and the President went up and asked them what they wished. His sympathetic manner loosed their tongues and they told him their story.