A PRESENT FOR MR. LINCOLN[ToC]
How President Lincoln Set Out for Washington and How He Returned.
Little Morris Rosenfelt stirred uneasily on the hard bench as he tried in vain to concentrate his wandering thoughts on his Hebrew lesson. It happened to be all about the building of the Tabernacle in the wilderness, but Morris was not at all interested in Bezalel, the artist of old, who built the first sanctuary for his people. Instead, although his eyes were fastened to the coarse black characters in the page before him, the boy was living over again the scene that had passed in the parlor of his father's house, the night before.
Mr. Abraham Kohn, city clerk of Chicago, had dropped in to talk over congregational matters with Morris's father, for Mr. Kohn was one of the early presidents of Kehilath Anshe Ma'arav, Chicago's first synagogue, and one of its most active members. Morris, busy in the next room with his lessons for the next day, had paid scant attention to their conversation, until the words, "Mr. Lincoln," and "flag" caught his ear. Then he closed his geography with a slam, for like every other nine-year-old boy of his day, he had heard much of the "rail splitter from Illinois," as his opponents called him, and shared his state's enthusiasm for the man who had just been elected president.
"I'm glad we Jews did our part in electing him," said Mr. Kohn. "He will make a strong president in these uncertain times; perhaps, the only man who can keep this country out of civil war if the southern states attempt to secede."
"They'll not fight, especially as Mr. Lincoln has promised not to interfere with slavery in the states where it now exists," Mr. Rosenfelt answered easily. He was a stout, cheerful man who refused to borrow trouble, very unlike Morris's mother who always saw sorrow and accident for her family hovering in the near future. "With a strong man like Mr. Lincoln in Washington, we can stop worrying for a while."
"I hope so." Mr. Kohn's voice was a little doubtful. "I hate to predict trouble, but I do believe that our candidate is going to have a harder row to plough than any president we ever had since Washington. I was thinking of that when I had the verses printed on the flag I am going to send him."
"Oh, are you going to send Mr. Lincoln a flag?" cried Morris, forgetting he was not supposed to be listening.
His father shook his head and ordered the boy to attend to his lessons. "His reports are worse every month," he told Mr. Kohn. "Rabbi Adler tells me he is a good boy, but that doesn't raise his marks in Hebrew and arithmetic and history, and his mother——"
"But I don't like history about dead people," objected the boy. "Now Mr. Lincoln's alive—and he's history, too, isn't he?"