Chapter IV

Realf's stay in Columbus must have been in that time of abeyance between Brown's capture and his death; but it must have been after the hanging at Charlestown that one night I was a particle of the crowd which seemed to fill the State House yard on its western front, dimly listening to the man whose figure was a blur against the pale stone. I knew that this man was that Abraham Lincoln who had met Stephen A. Douglas in the famous Illinois debates, and who was now on his way home to Illinois from his recognition in the East as a man of national importance. I could not well hear what he said, and I did not stay long; if I had heard perfectly, I might not, with my small pleasure in public speaking, have stayed long; and of that incident, and of the man whom history had already taken into her keeping, and tragedy was waiting to devote to eternal remembrance, I have only the vision of his figure against the pale stone, and the black crowd spread vaguely before him. Later I had a fuller sense of his historic quality, but still so slight, when he stood on the great stairway within the State House and received the never-ending crowd which pushed upward, man and woman after man and woman, and took his hand, and tried to say something as fit as it was fond. That would have been when he was on the journey, which became a flight, to his inauguration as President at Washington. He had been elected President, and the North felt safe in his keeping, though the dangers that threatened the nation had only gathered denser upon it, and the strange anomaly which called itself the government had been constantly betraying itself to the hostility within it and without.

The people who pushed upward to seize the great hand held out to every one looked mostly like the country folk such as he had been of, and the best of him always was, and I could hear their hoarse or cracked voices as they hailed him, oftenest in affectionate joking, sometimes in fervent blessing; but for anything I could make out he answered nothing. He stood passive, submissive, with the harsh lines of his lower face set immovably, and his thick-lashed eyes sad above them, while he took the hands held up to him one after another, and shook them wearily, wearily. It was a warm day such as in late February, or earliest March, brings the summer up to southern Ohio before its time, and brings the birds with it for the delusion of a week or a fortnight; and as we walked out, my companion and I, we left a sweltering crowd within the State House, and, straying slowly homeward, suffered under a sun as hot as June's.