Alistair Cooke writes, “Adlai Stevenson once told me about a curious experience he had relative to Abraham Lincoln. It was 1952. Stevenson had just lost the election to Eisenhower, and had been asked by outgoing President Harry Truman to spend the night at the White House. He was put in the Lincoln Room. When he came to undress, he looked at the bed, shuffled around it, staring in awe. But he could not bring himself to lie in it. He bedded down on the sofa.

I don’t know if he was ever apprised of the irony: in Lincoln’s day the bed wasn’t there; the sofa was.”

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