During this conversation the President sat leaning back in his desk chair with one long leg thrown over a corner of the Cabinet table. He had removed his right cuff--I presume to be better able to sign his name to the various documents with which the table was littered--and he did not trouble to put it on again. He wore a black frock coat very wrinkled and shiny, and trousers of the same description. His necktie was black and one end of it was caught under the flap of his turnover collar. Yet his appearance did not give one an impression of disorder; rather he looked like a neat workingman of the better sort. As I sat talking with the President a strong light flooded the Cabinet Room through the great south windows. Outside one could see the Potomac River sparkling in the bright winter sunshine. This strong illumination revealed the deep lines of the President's face. He looked so haggard and careworn after his long vigil (he had been at work since two o'clock in the morning) that I said: "You are very tired. I ought not to stay here and talk to you." "Please sit still," he replied, quickly. "I am very tired and I can get rested; and you are an excuse for not letting anybody else in until I do get rested." So I understood the reason, or perhaps it would be fairer to say the excuse, for granting me this remarkable privilege. Somehow the subject of education came up, and when Lincoln asked me if I was a college man I told him I had left Yale College Law School to go to war. Then he recounted an amusing experience which he once had in New Haven. He went to the old New Haven House to spend the night, and was given a room looking out on Chapel Street and the Green. Students were seated on the rail of the fence across the street, singing. Mr. Lincoln said that all he could remember of Yale College as a result of that visit was a continual repetition in the song they were singing: "My old horse he came from Jerusalem, came from Jerusalem, came from Jerusalem, leaning on the lamb." He said whimsically that he thought this was a good sample of college education as he had found it. Yet the President did not belittle the advantages to be gained by a college education properly and seriously applied. He said he often felt that he had missed a great deal by his failure to secure these advantages even though he thought the usual college education was inadequate and very impractical. He had found in his experience with the army that it took army officers from college just as long to learn military science as it did a young man from a farm. Then the President asked me how I, as a poor farmer's boy, got along at Yale. I told him I taught music in Yale to earn part of my living--dug potatoes in the afternoon, and taught music in the evening. Then he got up and walked up and down the room with his hands behind him, while he gave me quite a discourse on his opinion of music, and especially of church music.