twenty years at hull house

tor a quorum, and so no vote could be taken on the momentous question until the Union men could rally their forces.

My father always spoke of the martyred President as Mr. Lincoln,

and I never heard the great name without a thrill. I remember the day —it must have been one of comparative leisure, perhaps a Sunday —when at my request my father took out of his desk a thin packet

marked "Mr. Lincoln's Letters," the shortest one of which bore unmistakable traces of that remarkable personality. These letters began, "My

dear Douhle-D'ed Addams," and to the inquiry as to how the person

thus addressed was about to vote on a certain measure then before the

Legislature, was added the assurance that he knew that this Addams

"would vote according to his conscience," hut he begged to know in

which direction the same conscience "was pointing." As my father

folded up the hits of paper I fairly held my breath in my desire that he

should go on with the reminiscence of this wonderful man, whom he

had known in his comparative obscurity, or better still, that he should

he moved to tell some of the exciting incidents of the Lincoln-Douglas

debates. There were at least two pictures of Lincoln that always hung

in my father's room, and one in our old-fashioned upstairs parlor, of

Lincoln with little Tad. For one or all of these reasons 1 always tend to

associate Lincoln with the tenderest thoughts of my father.

I recall a time of great perplexity in the summer of 1894, when Chicago was filled with federal troops sent there hy the President of the

United States, and their presence was resented by the governor of the

state, that I walked the wearisome way from Hull- House to Lincoln

Park —for no cars were running regularly at that moment of sympathetic strikes —in order to look at and gain magnanimous counsel, if I might, from the marvelous St. Gaudens statue which had been but recently placed at the entrance of the park. Some of Lincoln's immortal

words were cut into the stone at his feet, and never did a distracted

town more sorely need the healing of "with charity towards all" than

did Chicago at that moment, and the tolerance of the man who had

won charity for those on both sides of "an irrepressible conflict."

Of the many things written of my father in that sad August in 1881,

when he died, the one 1 cared for most was written by an old political

friend of his who was then editor of a great Chicago daily. He wrote

that while there were doubtless many members of the Illinois Legislature who during the great contracts of the war time and the demoraliz