Page:Life and Works of Abraham Lincoln, v1.djvu/67

Rh to her bed with the fatal "milk sick." And as, at a late hour, Abe climbed into the loft with a companion whom he had already learned to call "John," and sank into the tender embrace of the most comfortable bed he had ever known, and compared notes and experiences with his new brother till a late hour, it is safe to assert that no such fine and unadulterated happiness ever visited him afterwards.

Mr. Lincoln once told me (in 1856) that John D. Johnston, his foster-brother, was about his own age, and that he loved him as if he had been his own brother; and yet John grew up to be one of the laziest and most shiftless of mortals. He constantly appealed to Lincoln for aid for himself and his progeny. I myself once strained a point, for Lincoln's sake, to save Johnston's son William from the penitentiary. And it is to the infinite credit of the great President that he adhered to, and came to the assistance of, not only his father and step-mother, and never deserted them, but that his fidelity even to the utterly worthless child of this remote connection was equally tenacious.

Almost the last act he performed in Illinois was to visit his step-mother. On the morning he started, he urged me to go with him, and, in fact, I went with him part way, and I have always since regretted that I did not accompany him during the entire journey.

His deep and earnest affection for his step- mother was returned in full measure by her. "Abe was the best boy I ever saw or ever expect, to see," was her summing-up of his character. As she parted with him at Charleston, 111., on the third day of February, 1861, this old lady, whose whole life had been one of unobtrusive