Page:Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field.djvu/151

 MARK ON LINCOLN'S HUMANITY

When Ida M. Tarbell's "Life of Lincoln" was running in McClure's during the late nineties, Mark said at luncheon at the Cafe Ronacher, Vienna, one afternoon: "That woman is writing a wonderfully good and accurate, intimate and comprehensive book and I do hope that, in the end, she will give the same prominence to Lincoln's correspondence on pardons as to other state papers of his. When you come to think of it, a lot of nonentities have got credit for able state papers, but it takes humanity to commute a sentence of death and Lincoln has commuted thousands. The only one he didn't and couldn't commute was one imposed by our friend. Ward Hill Lamon.

"Lamon, then Marshal of the District of Columbia, had seen Lincoln safely home and then made his usual rounds of the White House grounds. All seemed well, no cause for suspicion. Ward told me, and he was about to retire, when he thought he saw some movement amid a clump of green foliage. It looked as if a body was rising from the ground.

"'I reached the spot by three leaps, faced a dark figure and, without ado, dealt him a blow square between the eyes, knocking him down,' said the Marshal.

"Well," continued Mark, "you know Lamon as he looks now, still a 147