"'_Terrible_' is the word which all his friends used to describe him in the black mood.

'It was terrible! It was terrible!' said one to another." Judge Davis believes that Lincoln's hilarity was mainly simulated, and that "his stories and jokes were intended to whistle off sadness." "The groundwork of his social nature was sad," says Judge Scott.

"But for the fact that he studiously cultivated the humorous, it would have been very sad indeed.

His mirth always seemed to me to be put on; like a plant produced in a hot-bed, it had an unnatural and luxuriant growth." Mr.Herndon, Lincoln's law-partner and most intimate friend, describes him at this period as a "thin, tall, wiry, sinewy, grizzly, raw-boned man, looking 'woe-struck.' His countenance was haggard and careworn, exhibiting all the marks of deep and protracted suffering.

Every feature of the man--the hollow eyes, with the dark rings beneath; the long, sallow, cadaverous face intersected by those peculiar deep lines; his whole air; his walk; his long silent reveries, broken at long intervals by sudden and startling exclamations, as if to confound an observer who might suspect the nature of his thoughts,--showed he was a man of sorrows, not sorrows of to-day or yesterday, but long-treasured and deep, bearing with him a continual sense of weariness and pain.