Lincoln, the unknown

46 • LINCOLN THE UNKNOWNIt became his favorite. He often repeated it to himself when hethought no one else was listening; repeated it to people in thecountry hotels of Illinois; repeated it in public addresses; repeatedit to guests in the White House; wrote copies of it for hisfriends; and said:"I would give all I am worth, and go in debt, to be ableto write like that."He loved the last two stanzas best:isYea! hope and despondency, pleasure and pain,Are mingled together in sunshine and rain;And the smile and the tear and the song and the dirgeStill follow each other, like surge upon surge.Tis the wink of an eye, 'tis the draught of a breath,From the blossom of health to the paleness of death,From the gilded saloon to the bier and the shroud,Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?The old Concord Cemetery, where Ann Rutledge was buried,a peaceful acre in the midst of a quiet farm, surrounded onthree sides by wheat-fields and on the fourth by a blue-grasspasture where cattle feed and sheep graze. The cemetery itselfis overgrown now with brush and vines, and is seldom visitedby man. In the springtime the quails make their nests in it andthe silence of the place is broken only by the bleating of sheepand the call of the bob-white.For more than half a century the body of Ann Rutledgelay there in peace. But in 1890 a local undertaker started anew cemetery in Petersburg, four miles away. Petersburg alreadyhad a beautiful and commodious burying-ground knownas the Rose Hill Cemetery; so selling lots in the new one wasslow and difficult. Consequently, the greedy undertaker, in anunholy moment, conceived the gruesome scheme of violatingthe grave of Lincoln's sweetheart, bringing her dust to his cemetery,and using its presence there as an argument to boostsales.So "on or about the fifteenth of May, 1890"—to quote theexact words of his shocking confession—he opened her grave.And what did he find? We know, for there is a quiet old ladystill living in Petersburg who told the story to the author of thisvolume, and made an affidavit to its veracity. She is the daughterof McGrady Rutledge, who was a first cousin of Ann Rut-