it was. Slavery came before him in the shape of negroes under the whip, engaged in loading and unloading river craft, or toiling in unpaid drudgery among the hot fields along the banks. He saw negroes chained in coffles, on their way to and from the market, and he saw them bought and sold like cattle in the slave-mart at New Orleans. Only the unpleasant, the brutally offensive features of the black curse were permitted to make their impression upon him, and the brand they left was an ineffaceable scar.

All that was upon his inner boy, indeed, but it was to be in a manner supplemented and represented by a mark in the body he occupied. At the plantation of Madame Bushane, six miles below Baton Rouge, the flatboat was moored for the night against the landing, and the keepers were sound asleep in their little kennel of a cabin. They slept until the sound of stealthy footsteps on the deck aroused Allen Gentry, and he sprang to his feet. There could be no doubt as to the cause of the disturbance. A gang of negroes had boarded the boat for plunder, and they would think lightly enough, now they were discovered, of knocking the two traders on the head and throwing them into the river.

"Bring the guns, Abe!" shouted Allen. "Shoot them!"

The intruders were not to be scared away by even so alarming an outcry; and in an instant more Abe Lincoln was among them, not with a gun but with a serviceable club. They fought well, and one of them gave their tall enemy a wound, the scar of which he carried with him to his grave; but his strength and agility were too much for them. He beat them all off the boat, not killing any one man, but convincing the entire party that they had boarded the wrong "broad-horn."

The trip lasted about three months, going and coming, and in June the two adventurers were at home again, well satisfied with their success. Allen Gentry had profited the more largely in the mere matter of money, but his bow-hand had. brought back with him treasures of information; of experience

and education, gathered all the way from the mouth of Anderson's Creek, on the Ohio, to the very borders of the Gulf of Mexico. The whole country and the world itself was yet to be the better and the wiser for Abraham Lincoln's schooling in his slow summer voyage down the Mississippi and up again. Little he then dreamed that he was yet to direct the course of fleets on that same water, of armies along the winding shores, and the sieges of strong forts upon the bluffs and headlands.

His lessons were not all dark ones, doubtless, but the shadows upon his face were deepening with so much to think of, and there was small probability that he would again settle cheerfully down to the dull and empty life of the Little Pigeon Creek neighborhood.

CHAPTER X.

"OF ILLINOIS.'

Another Migration-Of full Age and Free-Farmhand and FlatboatmanMore Southern Studies-1830.

RAPIDLY as the young State of Indiana was filling up with sturdy farmers from the older settlements, it was still a very new country. And yet there was a newer and a more wonderful region spread out beyond it. The vast expanse of prairie and forest between the Indiana line and the Mississippi River had been formed into the State of Illinois. Men told marvelous tales of its fertility, and of the ease with which farms could be opened on land where so much and so perfect a clearing had been made by the hand of Nature.

John Hanks, a cousin of the Lincolns, had settled near Decatur, in central Illinois, in 1828, and his letters fired the imagination of Dennis Hanks to such a degree that he talked of little else than prairie-farming. He even made a visit to Illinois, and after his return the question of emigrating or not was as good as settled for the whole family. Dennis had now married the oldest daughter of Abe's good stepmother, and had made a sort of start in life for himself, so that he was in some degree an independent person; but Abe had yet a few short months to wait for manhood and freedom.

There were agencies at work to drive as well as to attract, for the "milk-sick" had appeared again, and was at work with terrible energy upon both beasts and human beings. In spite of that, however, a whole year was consumed in the process of getting away from the old place.

Another daughter of Mrs. Lincoln had married Levi Hall,

and the young couple joined the westward movement. Yet, when land and corn and stock had been sold, one large wagon held all the household stuff of the three families of Hanks, Hall, and Lincoln. They waited until the latter part of the winter of 1830, and Abraham Lincoln became of age but a few days before they set out for Illinois.

A worse time of the year could hardly have been selected for wagoning over western roads, but the choice of it was characteristic of Tom Lincoln. The four yoke of oxen over which Abe held the "gad" were barely sufficient to overcome the unending succession of mudholes, sloughs, and rivers through which the clumsy vehicle had to be hauled. It was an unusually good wagon for those days, although it was the very first Tom Lincoln ever owned, and it held together well.

On the first day of March, 1830, after two weeks of slow and laborious travel, the journey ended at the house of John Hanks near Decatur.

Abraham Lincoln had reached the scenes of his further education, his trials and his triumphs for the thirty years which then lay between him and his highest uses. He would need all the time, and a good use of all his opportunities: and these could hardly be fewer or poorer, nor could the obstacles to be overcome confront him with more insurmountable stubbornness, than those he had left behind him in the fever-haunted woods of Indiana.

He was

Some oppressions, indeed, were now removed. twenty-one, and was a free man and a voter. He could come and go as he pleased, and such wages as he might earn would be all his own. Beyond that, however, there was little to be said for him. Trade, profession, manual skill of any special kind, he had none except the coarse arts of the wood-chopper, the boatman, and rough farmer.

He was free, but his first work in Illinois was given to his father, or rather to his well-beloved stepmother; for he joined the other males of the family in building a house on a high

bank of the north fork of the Sangamon River, out of some logs already cut there, and given them for the purpose by John Hanks.

After the new homestead was completed and the family had moved into it, Abe and Dennis plowed up fifteen acres of prairie-land for corn, and split rails enough to fence it in. He had done what he could to leave matters in good shape behind him as he went out to toil for himself. But he severed no tie of affection in his going. To his dying day he never ceased to care for his "mother" and her comfort, and there was no interruption of the full current of her love for him.

It was a great day for Abraham Lincoln when, all present filial duty well performed, he once for all cut himself loose from the heaviest part of the load he had carried for twentyone long years. The crushing weight of that oppression no man can estimate. Not even if he has studied never so carefully what it is, and then was, to be a "poor white" in a new settlement; for different men take up different weights in the same pack. Young Lincoln himself had but dim and formless perceptions of the truth. Neither he nor any one else could know or comprehend, moreover, the wonderful manner and degree of the gain he had won from his very disadvantages. No one could discern or measure the internal growth, as all could the physical and external; but a giant had been trained and was still in training for a life-long wrestle with opposing forces of every name and nature.

It was about the middle of spring before a beginning could be made in the new career, but from that time forward Abe ceased to make his father's house his home. Except that it contained his mother, it could not be a home for him in any true sense. He never had had one: only a log-shelter to eat and sleep in; while the cattle he drove were better provided for, considering their natures and requirements. The life he had led had shown him the insides of many homes, and the life before him was to do the same: but none of these had been,