Imagine him again and again asking little girls to kiss him, snatching them to his thin breast, fondling them with tears in his eyes! Imagine him watching through weary nights by his son’s deathbed, standing stricken beside the little coffin, and then, for the first time, turning to the Bible for consolation! Imagine him entertaining his log-cabin cousin, Dennis Hanks, in the White House, and, when that simple soul disapproves of Secretary Stanton’s arrogance and urges him to “kick the frisky little Yankee out,” patiently answering, “It would be difficult to find another man to fill his place”! Imagine him sitting in his nightshirt on the edge of young John Hay’s bed, night after night, reading doggerel verses from the newspapers, cracking jokes or reciting from Shakespeare! Imagine him signing a pardon for a young soldier sentenced to be shot and hearing the sobs of that mother waiting outside, “Thank God! Thank Lincoln! Pardoned! Oh, my boy! my boy!” Imagine him facing the gray-haired father of another doomed soldier and saying, “If your son lives until I order him shot, he will live longer than ever Methuselah did”! Imagine him sitting at the table day after day, his face cold, abstracted, his gray eyes “seeing something in the air” and hardly touching his food! [Illustration: Life mask of Lincoln while President. Observe the wasted features, the kindly, humorous mouth, and the reverential indications of the high top head] Imagine him on the night after the bloody loss of Chancellorsville--seventeen thousand killed, wounded and missing! Mr. Stoddard, sitting in the deserted White House, underneath Lincoln’s room, has helped our imagination: “But that sound, the slow, heavy, regular tread of the President’s feet, pacing up and down in his room and thinking of Chancellorsville! A man’s tread may well be heavy when there is such a load upon his shoulders as Lincoln is carrying.... He can hear, in his heart, the thunder of the Union and Confederate guns, and the shrieks and groans that rise on the lost battlefield.... Ten o’clock--and now and then there have been momentary breaks, as if he paused in turning at the wall; but no pause has lasted longer than for a few heart-beats.... Eleven o’clock--and it is as if a more silent kind of silence had been obtained, for the tread can be heard more distinctly, and a sort of thrill comes with it now and then.... There has been no sound from the President’s room for a number of minutes, and he may be resting in his chair or writing. No; there it comes again, that mournfully monotonous tread, with its turnings at the wall.... Two o’clock comes, without another break in the steady tramp of Lincoln’s lonely vigil. Three o’clock arrives, and your task is done, and you pass out almost stealthily ... and the last sound in your ears is the muffled beat of that footfall.