William said, “Is this your gratitude?
Did I save your wife’s life or not? Tell
me that!”
Seven relations swarmed in from the kitchen and each
said, “And this is his gratitude!”
William’s sisters stared, bewildered, and said,
“And this is his grat—” but
were interrupted by their mother, who burst into tears
and exclaimed,
“To think that my sainted little Jimmy threw
away his life in the service of such a reptile!”
Then the pluck of the revolutionary McSpadden rose
to the occasion, and he replied with fervor, “Out
of my house, the whole beggarly tribe of you!
I was beguiled by the books, but shall never be beguiled
again —once is sufficient for me.”
And turning to William he shouted, “Yes, you
did save my, wife’s life, and the next man that
does it shall die in his tracks!”
Not being a clergyman, I place my text at the end
of my sermon instead of at the beginning. Here
it is, from Mr. Noah Brooks’s Recollections of
President Lincoln in Scribners Monthly:
J. H. Hackett, in his part of Falstaff,
was an actor who gave Mr. Lincoln great delight.
With his usual desire to signify to others his
sense of obligation, Mr. Lincoln wrote a genial little
note to the actor expressing his pleasure at
witnessing his performance. Mr. Hackett,
in reply, sent a book of some sort; perhaps it was
one of his own authorship. He also wrote
several notes to the President. One night,
quite late, when the episode had passed out of
my mind, I went to the white House in answer to a message.
Passing into the President’s office, I noticed,
to my surprise, Hackett sitting in the anteroom
as if waiting for an audience. The President
asked me if any one was outside. On being told,
he said, half sadly, “Oh, I can’t
see him, I can’t see him; I was in hopes he
had gone away.” Then he added, “Now
this just illustrates the difficulty of having
pleasant friends and acquaintances in this place.
You know how I liked Hackett as an actor, and how
I wrote to tell him so. He sent me that
book, and there I thought the matter would end.
He is a master of his place in the profession, I
suppose, and well fixed in it; but just because
we had a little friendly correspondence, such
as any two men might have, he wants something.
What do you suppose he wants?” I could not
guess, and Mr. Lincoln added, “well, he
wants to be consul to London. Oh, dear!”
I will observe, in conclusion, that the William Ferguson
incident occurred, and within my personal knowledge—though
I have changed the nature of the details, to keep
William from recognizing himself in it.
All the readers of this article have in some sweet
and gushing hour of their lives played the role of
Magnanimous-Incident hero. I wish I knew how
many there are among them who are willing to talk about
that episode and like to be reminded of the consequences
that flowed from it.
