EXECUTIVE MANSION, WASHINGTON, DEAR FANNY, - It is with deep regret that I learn of the death of your kind and brave father, and especially that it is affecting your young heart beyond what is common in such cases. In this sad world of ours sorrow comes to all, and to the young it comes with bittered agony because it takes them unawares. The older have learned ever to expect it. I am anxious to afford some alleviation of your present distress. Perfect relief is not possible, except with time. You cannot now realize that you will ever feel better. Is not this so? And yet it is a mistake. You are sure to be happy again. To know this, which is certainly true, will make you some less miserable now. I have had experience enough to know what I say, and you need only to believe it to feel better at once. The memory of your dear father, instead of an agony, will yet be a sad, sweet feeling in your heart, of a purer and holier sort than you have known before. Please present my kind regards to your afflicted mother. Your sincere friend, MISS FANNY MCCULLOUGH, Bloomington, Ill. A. LINCOLN. Gen. W. H. L. Wallace, who fell at Shiloh, was a friend whom Lincoln held in the tenderest regard. He knew his character as a man and his inestimable value as a soldier quite as well as they are now known to the country. Those who have read General Grant's "Memoirs " will understand from that great general's estimate of him what was the loss of the federal service in the untimely death of Wallace. Mr. Lincoln felt it bitterly and deeply. But his was a public and a private grief united, and his lamentations were touching to those who heard them, as I did. The following account of General Wallace's death is taken from an eloquent memorial address, by the Hon. Leonard Swett in the United States Circuit Court, upon our common friend the late Col. T. Lyle Dickey, who was the father-in-law of Wallace : "Mrs. Gen. W. H. L. Wallace, who was Judge Dickey's eldest daughter, as the battle of Shiloh approached, became impressed with the sense of impending danger to her husband, then with Grant's army. This impression haunted her until she could stand it no longer; and in one of the most severe storms of the season, at twelve o'clock at night, she started alone for the army where her husband was. At Cairo she was told that no women could be permitted to go up the Tennessee River. But affection has a persistency which will not be denied. Mrs. Wallace finding a party bearing a flag to the Eleventh Infantry from the ladies of Ottawa, to be used instead of their old one, which had been riddled and was battle-worn, got herself substituted to carry that flag : and thus with one expedient and another she finally reached Shiloh, six hundred miles from home and three hundred through a hostile country, and through the more hostile guards of our own forces. "She arrived on Sunday, the 6th of April, 1862, when the great storm-centre of that battle was at its height, and in time to receive her husband as he was borne from the field terribly mangled by a shot in the head, which he had received while endeavoring to stay the retreat of our army as it was falling back to the banks of the river on that memorable Sunday, the first day of that bloody battle. She arrived in time to recognize him, and be recognized by him; and a few days afterward, saying, 'We shall meet again in heaven,' he died in the arms of that devoted wife, surrounded by Judge Dickey and his sons and the brothers of General Wallace." These are but a few cases of death and mutilation in the military service cited to show how completely Mr. Lincoln shared the sufferings of our soldiers. It was with a weight of singular personal responsibility that some of these misfortunes and sorrows seemed to crowd upon his sympathetic heart. CHAPTER VII. HAT " DREAMS AND PRESENTIMENTS. TH every man has within him his own Patmos," Mr. Lin Victor Hugo was not far wrong in declaring. "Revery," says the great French thinker, "fixes its gaze upon the shadow until there issues from it light. Some power that is very high has ordained it thus." coln had his Patmos, his "kinship with the shades;" and this is, perhaps, the strangest feature of his character. That his intellect was mighty and of exquisite mould, that it was of a severely logical cast, and that his reasoning powers were employed in the main on matters eminently practical, all men know who know anything about the real Lincoln. The father of modern philosophy tells us that "the master of superstition is the people; and in all superstitions wise men follow fools." Lord Bacon, however, was not unwilling to believe that storms might be dispersed by the ringing of bells, -a superstition that is not yet wholly dead, even in countries most distinguished by modern enlightenment. Those whom the great Englishman designated "masters of superstition, fools," were the common people whose collective wisdom Mr. Lincoln esteemed above the highest gifts of cultured men. That the Patmos of the plain |