Let us now get back to that room in the White House again. After Lincoln had finished reading from Ward’s book we talked about the author.

The two stories long accredited to Ward at which Mr. Lincoln laughed most heartily that day included the anecdote of the gray-haired lover who hoped to win a young wife and who, when asked by a neighbor how he was progressing with his suit, answered, with enthusiasm, “All right.”

When the neighbor then asked, “Has she called you ‘Honey’ yet?” the old man answered, “Well, not exactly that, but she called me the next thing to it. She has called me ‘Old Beeswax’!”

Another story which Lincoln accredited to Ward had to do with a visit the latter was supposed to have made in his country clothes and manners to a fashionable evening party. Ward, not wishing to show the awkwardness he felt, stepped boldly up to an aristocratic lady and said, “You are a very handsome woman!” The woman took it to be an insulting piece of rude flattery and replied, spitefully, “I wish I could say the same thing of you!” Whereupon Ward boldly remarked, “Well, you could if you were as big a liar as I am!”

Ward once stated that Lincoln told him that he was an expert at raising corn to fatten hogs, but, unfortunately for his creditors, they were his neighbor’s hogs.

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.

He said the inconsistency of church music was something that astonished him: that if you go to any place other than a church the music is always appropriate for the place and time. In the theater, for example, they sing songs which have some connection with the acting. (Perhaps that example would not apply to-day.) But in church very often there did not seem to be any relation whatever between what the congregation or the choir sings and the sermon. Then he told me about some “highfalutin’ songs” he had heard in church, which he said would be ridiculous if it was not in church; he was disgusted with the lack of sacred art and of appropriateness in church music. He finished by saying that he did not favor “dance music at a funeral.” There is a good deal of common sense in that!

I do not now recall just how the subject was introduced, but Lincoln talked to me about dreams, and he said that while he could not see any scientific reason for believing in dreams, nevertheless that he did in a measure believe in them, although he could not explain why. He said that they had undeniably influenced him.

Then he spoke of dreams he had “since the war came on,” which had influenced him a great deal. He said, “There might not be much in dreams, but when I dream we have been defeated it puts me on my nerve to watch out and see how things are. Men may say dreams are of no account, but they are suggestive to me, and in that respect of great account.”

When the President spoke of the people who were waiting to see him, I said:

“No doubt many of them, like myself, are strangers to you. How do you select those you will let in when you can’t see them all?”

He replied that he decided a good deal by names, and then he told me what seemed a good point to remember, that he had trained his memory in his youth by determining to remember people’s faces and names together. This he had done when he was first elected to the legislature in Illinois. He realized at once when he got into the legislature that he could not make a speech like the rest of “those fellows,” college people, but he could get a personal acquaintance and great influence if he would remember everybody’s face and everybody’s name; and so he said he had acted upon the plan of carrying a memorandum book around with him and setting down carefully the name of each man he met, and then making a little outline sketch with his pencil of some feature of the man—his ears, nose, shoulder, or something which would help him to remember.

Lincoln then told me a story about James G. Blaine when the latter was first elected to Congress. Blaine afterward repudiated this story, but it serves to illustrate Lincoln’s thought none the less. He said that Blaine hired a private secretary to help him out in remembering people. His system was to have the secretary meet all those who entered the reception room and ask their names, where they lived, what families they belonged to, and all the information that could be gained about them in a social way. Then, according to the story, the secretary ran around to the back door to Mr. Blaine’s private office and gave him a full memorandum about his callers. A few minutes later, when the visitor was ushered in, the secretary told him to “walk right in to see Mr. Blaine.”

He would say in the most casual manner: “Mr. Blaine is in there. You can go right in.”

Mr. Blaine would get up, shake hands with the man, ask him how his relations were, how long it had been since he was in the legislature, whether his wife’s brother had been successful in the West, etc., until the visitor came to be perfectly astounded.

As a result of this Mr. Blaine became very famous for his memory of names. But even if the story about the source of Blaine’s “memory” is untrue, Lincoln was probably ahead of him and, indeed, of any man in this country; he could remember every person he had ever seen in twenty years’ time. That was one of the things that became evident when I asked him how he could judge the visitors. In the majority of cases he had seen the man or heard of him in some connection, perhaps years before. He also said that he judged strangers by their names because when he heard their names he would think of other people he did know by that name, and he judged they might belong to that family and have the same traits.

He admitted that he was sometimes guided by the suggestion of Artemus Ward, who told him a story of a boys’ club in Boston which did not take in any members who were not Irish. A boy came along and asked to be admitted to the club, and the members asked, “Are you Irish?”

“Oh yes,” replied the boy, “I am Irish.”

“What is your name?”

“My name is Ikey Einstein.”

Lincoln, smiling, said, “The Irish boys kicked that boy out forthwith.”

He said, “Artemus Ward, when telling me that story, confirmed me in my view that a name does have something to do with the man. But,” Lincoln added, “if it is Smith, I have no way of getting at it.” Then he said, more seriously, that he had to be guided a great deal by an instinctive impression of the visitor as he came in the door.

“Seldom a person sits down at this table, or desk, but I have formed an opinion of the man’s disposition and traits, by an instinctive impression.”

He acknowledged that he could not always trust to this, but was generally guided by it and found he got along very well with it. Sometimes, however, he did make a mistake, as when on one occasion he had talked to a man for half an hour as though he was a hotel keeper, and found out afterward that he was a preacher.

Through all this conversation there had run an undercurrent of whimsicality, partly, no doubt, the conscious effort of a sorely tried mind to gain a few minutes’ respite from its pressing cares, but none the less showing a keen and deep-seated appreciation of the funny side of life. Only once did this humor forsake him, and that was when Lincoln spoke of Tad. The little boy had been playing quietly by himself all the time—apparently he was as much at home in the Cabinet Room as in any other part of the White House—and Lincoln told me Tad had been sick and that it worried him.

Then he put his head in both his hands, looked down at the table, and said, “No man ought to wish to be President of the United States!”

Still holding his head in his hands, he said to me, “Young man, do not take a political office unless you are compelled to; there are times when it is heart-crushing!”

He said he had thought how many a mother and father had lost their children in the war—just boys.

“And I am so anxious about my Tad, I cannot help but think how they must feel. If Tad had died—”

He grew very sad; for a few minutes his face was gloomy, and it seemed as though half a sob was coming up in his throat.

Lincoln was not one of those men who go to the extremes of grief or the extremes of joy; but other people have told me, as I myself now saw, that when there came to him that seizure of deep sadness he had to fight himself for a few minutes to overcome it. This impressed me that day very deeply. Breaking off abruptly from what he had been talking about—war and Artemus Ward—and speaking suddenly of Tad, he had dropped down in that dejected position, and for a few minutes looked so sad I thought something awful must suddenly have come to his mind. But it seemed, after all, to be only the fear that Tad, who was not very well, might die. Who can say what vistas of thought that idea may have opened.