Your guess: "angels" or "ages?"

[L Verge]

Tom - Welcome back to posting! We've missed you.

As for "ages" vs. "angels," I think that your comment as to "ages" being the most striking and Bill's that it appears on the tomb sort of lend credence to some of our thoughts that "ages" may have been substituted by Hay in later years to give more dignity to the phrase. Tanner would then report it in his reminiscences - and a legend is born.

I have never been to the Lincoln Tomb. Is the phrase inscribed on the sarcophagus or on a wall? In either case, when did it first appear "written in stone" there? Before or after Hays's writings?