“For days and days ’twas awful here. Waitin’ and waitin’. Seemed as if that funeral never would end. I couldn’t bear to think of him bein’ dragged around the country and havin’ all that fuss made over him. He always hated fussin’ so. Still, I s’pose I’d been mad if they hadn’t done it. Seemed awful, though. I kind a felt that he belonged to us now, that they ought to bring him back and let us have him now they’d killed him.
“Of course they got here at last, and I must say it was pretty grand. All sorts of big bugs, Senators and Congressmen, and officers in grand uniforms and music and flags and crape. They certainly didn’t spare no pains givin’ him a funeral. Only we didn’t want ’em. We wanted to bury him ourselves, but they wouldn’t let us. I went over onct where they’d laid him out for folks to see. I reckon I won’t tell you about that. I ain’t never goin’ to get that out of my mind. I wisht a million times I’d never seen him lyin’ there black and changed—that I could only see him as he looked sayin’ ‘good-by’ to me up to the Soldiers’ Home in Washington that night.
“Ma and me didn’t go to the cemetery with ’em. I couldn’t stan’ it. Didn’t seem right to have sich goin’s on here at home where he belonged, for a man like him. But we go up often now, ma and me does, and talk about him. Blamed if it don’t seem sometimes as if he was right there—might step out any minute and say ‘Hello, Billy, any new stories?’
“Yes. I knowed Abraham Lincoln; knowed him well; and I tell you there wan’t never a better man made. Leastwise I don’t want to know a better one. He just suited me—Abraham Lincoln did.”
THE END
THE McCLURE PRESS, NEW YORK
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
- Silently corrected typographical errors.
- Retained anachronistic and non-standard spellings as printed.