But presently, he said with his dry smile: "But I do not pretend I do not want to go to the Senate!"--(Henry Villard, then newspaper reporter.)
ONE HAPPY DAY.
To his friend Bowen, Lincoln avowed during the electioneering-time that he was sure "from the word go," to become President, though the split of the opposition into three parties was materially helpful: Douglas, Bell, and Breckenridge. He thought the reward due him as having gone "his whole length" for the Republican party, almost his creation. So he frankly said on his success:
"I cannot conceal the fact that I am a very happy man. Who could help being so under such circumstances?"--(To H. C. Bowen, of the New York Independent.)
OLD ABE WILL LOOK BETTER WHEN HIS HAIR IS COMBED.
"Did I ever tell you the joke the Chicago newsboys had on me? (To the War Department telegraph manager, A. B. Chandler.) A short time before my nomination (for President), I was at Chicago attending to a lawsuit. A photographer asked me to sit for a picture, and I did so. This coarse, rough hair of mine was in particularly bad tousle at the time, and the picture presented me in all its fright. After my nomination, this being about the only picture of me there was, copies were struck off to show those who had never seen me how I looked. The newsboys carried them around to sell, and had for their cry:
"'Here's your "Old Abe"--he will look better when he gets his hair combed!'"
He laughed heartily, says Mr. Chandler.
NOTE.--Mrs. Lincoln seems to have perceived this bar to her husband's facial beauty. For the journalist, Fiske, relating the arrival of the Lincolns in New York for the Eastern tour in 1860, speaks thus of the toilet to befit him for the reception by Mayor Fernando Wood:
"The train stopped, and Mrs. Lincoln opened her handbag, and said: