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Show LINCOLN'S HOUSE. Aad Ills Old Chum. On meet In the Capital Capi-tal of Illinois. Oath's Bprliiglleld Letter. In tho town of .Springfield is Mr. Lincoln'! house, rather thinnish, oblong, ob-long, of clapboards, with a back building build-ing right at the corner of a street, the corner upheld by a brick wall where earth is filled in to give the terraco a height. No dormers aro in the blank roof of this house, which might have cost ,000 in its day. There Linooln matured his campaign against Douglas, I suppose; at least he received there news of his nomination. The state has purchased thu house ami keeps a custodian custo-dian in it, who shows the rooms morning morn-ing and afternoon, but not at dinner time, and as I arrived at the dinner hour I stopped at the front stops. Over the door is tho sign "Liucoln's House;" tho carriage block of stono says ''Lincoln ''Lin-coln Homestead." A good many persons live in Springfield Spring-field who were intimate with Lincoln, and among them that blue-haired Diogenes, Herndon, who, not having been raised by a contemporaneous age and posterity" to Mr. Lincoln's pedestal has been industriously proving through the aid of Kentucky letters that Mr. Lincoln's mother had no marriage certificate, cer-tificate, etc. Indeed one can go to this biographer and almost soe the kind of brood that Lincoln was of when ho was a south Indiana boy. The assistant to Mr. Herndon in getting up much of this pious biography has been the son of one of I5uchaniin's cabinet ministers, minis-ters, who thought it incumbent upon tha age his father served to show Mr. Lincoln up in the least inviting light. Thus, while one set of resurrectionists is tussling for the bones of thu great man, another set is tussling for his poor and ordinary antecedents; and both bones aud antecedents are equally uuimportant to those who know that oportunity is fame and that even tho Christian era was- perhaps due to the humiliation of the Jewand the extension exten-sion of their provincialism to the larger concerns of mankind by the accident of the Roman conquest. The Jew, so to speak, had beeii taken into the American Ameri-can union of that day, aud his mind was pointing toward Washington, otherwise oth-erwise ltorue. In his pristine condition he had no right to give general maxims since his gospel was for himself and the posterity of Israel, but having been raised from his territorial condition to become a citizen of the world by the help of Ciesar, he thought it incumbent upon him to teach the world how it should live ami moye and havo its being. be-ing. Some of the streets of Springfield, Spring-field, which are generally wide, are pretty, though the tearing 'down of the cemetery fences which inclosed the houses let those houses stand out in thu light of grass aud liberty. Among such houses I noticed that "of Malcolm Hay, a lawyer and close friend of Lin-coin, Lin-coin, the undo of Colonel John Hay of Washington. Old chums of Mr. Lincoln remain who tell curious stories upon him. He was a good (leal hen pecked, aud on one occasion a distinguished party came from the east and was invited home by Lincoln, who had become the presidential presiden-tial nominee. The mailame at home said she had been bothered enough by these people and that she was not going go-ing to get up any dinner. Lincoln felt humiliated, nnd yet he knew the hard typo of woman he had to deal with. Ho had a friend intown who was well-to-do and had a good house, and to him he related bis disability. "Never mind," said this rich man, who was a sort of Joseph of Arirnathca, not toward to-ward the corpse, but toward the man; "you come around to my holme aud invite in-vite three or four friends, if you want to, and you can just say that "for privacy priv-acy and to get away from the crowd, you have brought them into a little nook of your own." The dinner was there given and the host related the circumstance to a prominent railroad man in Kansas, who told mo tho same but yesterday. My informant also said that among tho curious letters his friend had at ispringlield was one from Carl Si'hurz, who was in want of a now political job, and Mr Lincoln was advised to find some nllice for him and have pacification. paci-fication. Mr. Lincoln's reply was in something like the following iauguagn: "Tho trouble is to find a place for the man when no place seeks the man." Mr. Lincoln bids fair to go into the list of legendary characters in tho course of time since tho pharisee in huruau nature is so undying that wo refuse to take our hero from tho dust of the earth, as (iod is said to have made him. We insist in-sist upon endowing him after he has become famous with all the social charms and tiie niceties of conversation. We waut to polish him up, wipe his face, wipe his conversation and sternly stand by the fact that his grandmother never danced a hornpipo before a pine wood fire, but that, on the contrary, she was reading the history of Queen Klliibeth and switching the (lies oil' with a brush of peacock's feathers. The age of decoration has left Lincoln far behind. Ho has no place at the bargain counter. Now and then some person will ask why all this apology for the horo of an importunity, who was like great body of his fellow citizetis, of poor and dubious du-bious extraction, but who learned from the command of his fellow citizens and the institutions of liberty that to do right is the highest law. We are iu .danger, however, of doing justice on another side, ami a person in Kansas said to me, with the best intentions, that ho hoped it would be proved that Lincoln was not the sou of Thomas Lincoln, bnt of some Mr. Hardin or other iu Kentucky. Who knows ' ': that tho social assumption of Mrs. L.n-coln L.n-coln brought her husband half way onward on-ward toward that amount of behavior which in the end fitted him so well? Socrates was the Lincoln rff antiquity, and yet his wife was Xantippe. |