 An unemployed man, apparently a failure at age fifty, peers into a lake, considering his fate. A mysterious stranger comes up and tells him a story of a  John Jones , and his dark 30 years of hard struggle through life to age 50. This man too was an apparent  failure at fifty . He was so depressed at one dark stage of his life, that this man said in his own words: "At this period of my life, I never dared to carry a pocket knife." His own friends feared for his very sanity. But then within two years he was elected President. This man was Abraham Lincoln. Suddenly the mysterious stranger is gone, but the unemployed man realizes Lincoln s philosophy: "God must have loved the common people, because he made so many of them."