you." His smile broadened, he seemed much amused. Then I remember very distinctly the troubled, weary, careworn expression that passed over his face as he replied: "I wish everybody, Congress, all the people, were like you boys." I could say nothing, could only gaze into his benevolent eyes that seemed to look into my very heart. Presently he asked me how old I was, where I went to school, and a few other questions of like familiar sort. And then again, giving me his hand he said: "Now, you must excuse me; I have important business with this gentleman, " indicating the personage with whom he had been conversing when I entered the room. I shook hands with the President, turned and walked to the door, faced about, made my manners, as he, reseating himself in the curious armchair, resumed his interview with the minister of France. I passed from the room and never again saw that wonderful, kindly face until as one of thousands upon thousands of griefstricken, almost heart-broken fellow countrymen, I passed by his open coffin and beheld for a moment the body of "the murdered President" as it lay in state in the rotunda of the city hall of my native New York. Through all the years that have passed since I stood in the living presence of the great leader of my people and he laid his hand gently on my head my memory has held an undimmed, imperishable picture of the good and kindly man, the warworn, overwrought President, who, in the unbounded goodness of his heart, turned from his work, his crowding duties, forgetting for a few brief moments his cruel anxieties, to treat with sweet patience and speak gently to a schoolboy who had no claim on his attention and courtesy save that the boy was growing up to be an American citizen, one of the multitude of "the plain people" of whom Lincoln himself quaintly said: "the good Lord must love them, he made so many of them." This incident of my boyhood, this great event in my life, of all events the most memorable and inspiring, this meeting with Abraham Lincoln, was altogether charming. The memory of it is to me inexpressibly sacred. When I recall vividly, as I do, the form and face of Lincoln as it appeared to my young eyes, I can appreciate the significance of a remark made to me by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, as he stood modelling "the Chicago Lincoln": "When I began this work I despaired of making a worthy or satisfactory statue. So many, almost all, of the likenesses of Lincoln represent him as ungainly, uncouth, homely, unpicturesque; but when I had made a study of his life, had learned more and more of his character, of his natural nobility and lovableness, his deep and true human sympathy, had read of him, talked of him with men who knew him and loved him, I became more and more convinced that his face must have been the most truly beautiful of all I have tried to model." As my good friend the great sculptor created his mind-picture of Abraham Lincoln which he realized in his masterpiece, so I recall to mind his face and form after all the years that have passed since I, a small boy, stood in the living presence of the greatest of Americans. As I think of him now, his greatness of spirit, his worth, integrity, honesty of purpose, his kindliness, his wit and wisdom, his patience all shone in his countenance and through his wonderful eyes and, as the man was altogether lovable and admirable in the highest sense, I believe that the face that smiled down upon me years ago was in the highest sense beautiful. That I am justified in my belief there is the testimony of his private secretary and co-biographer, Honorable J. G. Nicolay, who says of him: "There was neither oddity, eccentricity, awkwardness, or grotesqueness in his face, figure, or movement"; and men and women who knew Lincoln remember his "soft, tender, dreamy, patient, loving eyes the kindest eyes ever placed in mortal head." As to his wisdom, his genius, his inestimable greatness of spirit, "his nobly humane simplicity of character," there is no need to speak. When Edwin M. Stanton, who was standing by the death-bed of his revered chieftain, closed the eyes of the sacred dead, the great war secretary uttered what seems to me the most fitting and enduring epitaph on Abraham Lincoln: "There lies a man for the ages." A LIKENESS (PORTRAIT BUST OF AN UNKNOWN, CAPITOL, ROME) By Willa Sibert Cather IN every line a supple beauty- This youth who passed and left no trace The hope of all his House, the brother Or chanced the riskier game at home Whether he dreamed a dream in Asia Somehow entrammelled with his pain. "The dice of gods are always loaded"; Incapable of compromises, Unable to forgive or spare, The strange awarding of the prizes Tricked by the forms of things material, The solid-seeming arch and stone, The noise of war, the pomp imperial, The heights and depths about a throne He missed, among the shapes diurnal, The old, deep-travelled road from pain, Ritratto d'ignoto; defying Things unsubstantial as a dream- His face still set against the stream. His sorrow in a marble face. AN ENGLISH WRITER'S NOTES ΟΝ ENGLAND BY VERNON LEE THE CELTIC WEST (CORNWALL, WALES, IRELAND) M ILLUSTRATIONS BY HOWARD GILES NEAR TINTAGIL Y first walk in Cornwall was at sunset, up and down the gray granite roads, sunk deep between high banks and shorn hedges; the cold wind whistling and rain falling from unseen clouds. Over the stone walls and hedgetops a moving wall of toppling cumulus, black illumined crimson from a hidden sunset; the sky above pale amber, blue, and wind-swept. Where a gate or fence breaks through the endless bank a view of green hilly pasture cut with endless dark hedge, and long distant hillsides, flat almost as the sea, which is hidden behind them a bleak, monotonous country, dreary beyond words, and intolerable save for its keen air; houses next to none; this village consists of five or six granite, slate-covered cottages, flowerless. The roads for miles without a creature on them. The pastures empty. I was quite superstitiously frightened in this solitude by the sudden grunting of two huge hogs behind a hedge; and the great black brutes looked bogeyish as elephants as they tugged with their tusks at the fence. The wind whistled among hedges and thistles, and moaned round the earthworks of what was once a British camp. A scarecrow man, in a sodden potato field hard by, gave me a start in that solitude. The sun slowly emerged, a red wafer from under the clouds, and disappeared, leaving no glow behind. TINTAGIL Yesterday Tintagil. Endless drive across these uplands, dreary even under the bright, harsh sun. Long, low, sad lines of reaped fields and distant moors: no birds save swarms of sparrows flying before us from bush to bush of the endless, roughly hacked hedge. At last a wave-shaped crag rises into sight -black, curling as about to break: Roughtor (pronounced Row-tor), the mountain of the district, a granite bowlder among the |