Page:Samuel Scoville -Abraham Lincoln, His Story.djvu/37

 to draw than that of his appearance and habits. There were two men in Lincoln. One of them was the Lincoln known to all his townsfolk—the plain, honest, shrewd, kindly, humorous man, with a certain native dignity which kept them from calling him by his first name. "He was folky but not familiar," one of them afterward wrote. The other man was the dreamer, who made his dreams come true; the mystic, who dreamed of the swift ship carrying him to a dark shore before the battles of Antietam, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and the night before his death; the thinker, who walked the streets wrapped in solitude, not seeing his best friends, but looking beyond the horizon and pondering in his own mind through many a lonely night the great problem of slavery. It was this Lincoln whom few even of his best friends knew. To the day of his death some of them persisted in believing that his greatness was an accident or a miracle. Lincoln's own words throw light on what were the guiding motives of his inner life:

he wrote to Judge Gillespie.

he said to his little son "Tad."