there were with him about four hundred men.”

A primary and intermediate school was so located as to be separated by a fence from the rear of the White House grounds. The President often watched the children play. One morning the teacher gave them a lesson in neatness, and asked each boy to come to school next day with his shoes blacked. They all obeyed. One of them, John S., a poor one-armed lad, had used stove polish, the only kind his home afforded. The boys were merciless in their ridicule. The boy was only nine years old, the son of a dead soldier, his mother a washerwoman, with three other children to provide for. The President heard the boys jeering Johnny, and learned the facts about the boy.

The next day John S. came to school with a new suit and with new shoes, and told that the President had called at his home and took him to the store and bought two suits of clothes for him and clothes for his sisters, and sent coal and groceries to the house. In addition to this the lad brought to the teacher a scrap of paper containing a verse of Scripture, which Mr. Lincoln had requested to have written upon the blackboard:

“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”

Some weeks after the President visited the school, and the teacher directed his attention to the verse, which was still there. Mr. Lincoln read it; then, taking a crayon, said: “Boys, I have another quotation from the Bible, and I hope you will learn it and come to know its truth as I have known and felt it.” Then below the other verse he wrote:

The influence of the Bible on the life and literature of Lincoln was remarkable. It gave to this nation and the world a life of service, and in that service he placed the most delicate spirit of sincerity, sobriety, sympathy, and love. In literature he has given to us abiding beauty in its simplicity and strength of expression. Of his Gettysburg speech the London Quarterly Review said, substantially, that the oration surpassed every production of its class known in literature; that only the oration of Pericles over the victories of the Peloponnesian War could be compared to it, and that was put into his mouth by the historian Thucydides. Mr. Sumner said it was the most finished piece of oratory he had ever seen. Every word was appropriate. None could be omitted and none added and none changed.

Professor Albert S. Cook, teacher of English Language and Literature in Yale, in his book, The Bible and English Prose Style, seeking to show the influence of the Bible on the style of great writers, says: “But the matter is beyond dispute when we come to a piece of classic prose like Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, which certainly owes nothing to the Romans of the Decadence.” Then this sample of the Bible style is given: “‘Neither party expected the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and prayed to the same God, and each invoked his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been fully. The Almighty has his own purposes!’

“At this point we may pause, for we need no further demonstration of the indebtedness of