The death of his sweetheart was a terrible blow to Lincoln. His melancholy increased and darkened his mind and his imagination, and tortured him with its black picture. One stormy night he was sitting beside a friend of his, with his head bowed on his hand, while tears trickled through his fingers. His friend begged him to try to control his sorrow; to try to forget it. Lincoln replied: “I cannot; the thought of the snow and rain on Ann’s grave fills me with indescribable grief.” For many days Lincoln journeyed on foot to the cemetery where Anna Rutledge lay buried, and there alone, in the “city of the dead,” wept for the girl whom he had loved so well. Many years afterward, when he had married and become great, he said to a friend who questioned him: “I really and truly loved the girl and think often of her now.” After a pause he added: “And I have loved the name of Rutledge to this day.”
THE DUEL LINCOLN DIDN’T FIGHT.
President Abraham Lincoln and General Joe Shields, who married sisters, once arranged to fight a duel at Alton, Ill. It is remembered yet by the old settlers. Shields had offended a young lady at Springfield, and she got even by sending an article about it to a Springfield paper, signing a nom de plume. The next day General Shields called upon the editor and gave him 24 hours during which to divulge the name of the author or to take the consequences. The editor, who was a friend of Abraham Lincoln, called upon him and asked what to do. Not thinking it was a very serious affair, Lincoln promptly said, “Tell him that I wrote it.” The editor did so, and General Shields challenged Lincoln to a duel, the latter accepting and choosing broadswords as the weapons and an island opposite Alton as the place. The principals and seconds went to the place appointed, when a chance remark of Lincoln that he hated to have to kill Shields because he caused him to believe that he wrote the article in order to protect a lady, brought about a reconciliation, and the duel failed to come off. Hundreds of people were on the bank of the river, and to carry out a joke a log was dressed up, placed in a skiff, the occupants fanning it with their hats as though it was an injured man, and the excitement was intense. It always remained a sore spot with Lincoln, and but little was ever said about it.
LINCOLN AS A DANCER.
Lincoln made his first appearance in society when he was first sent to Springfield, Ill., as a member of the state legislature. It was not an imposing figure which he cut in a ballroom, but still he was occasionally to be found there. Miss Mary Todd, who afterward became his wife, was the magnet which drew the tall, awkward young man from his den. One evening Lincoln approached Miss Todd and said, in his peculiar idiom:
“Miss Todd, I should like to dance with you the worst way.”
The young woman accepted the inevitable and hobbled around the room with him. When she returned to her seat, one of her companions asked mischievously:
“Well, Mary, did he dance with you the worst way?”