He was a man of practical expedients. He always found some way to get out of difficulties, whether moral or mechanical, and was equally ingenious in his expedients for escaping or surmounting each variety. Governor Yates, in a speech at Springfield, before a meeting at which William G. Greene presided, quoted Mr. Greene as having said that the first time he ever saw Lincoln he was "in the Sangamon River, with his trousers rolled up five feet more or less, trying to pilot a flat-boat over a mill-dam. The boat was so full of water that

it was hard to manage. Lincoln got the prow over, and then, instead of waiting to bail the water out, bored a hole through the projecting part, and let it run out." Barring a little western extravagance in the statement of a measurement, the incident is truly recorded; and it illustrates more forcibly than words can describe the man's ingenuity in the quick invention of moral expedients, then and afterwards. His life had been a life of expedients. He had always been engaged in making the best of bad conditions and untoward circumstances, and in meeting and mastering emergencies. Among those who did not understand him, he had the credit or the discredit, of being a cunning man; but cunning was not at all an element of his nature or character. He was simply ingenious; he was wonderfully ingenious; but he was not cunning. Cunning is, or tries to be, far-sighted; ingenuity disposes of occasions. Cunning contrives plots; ingenuity dissolves them. Cunning sets traps; ingenuity evades them. Cunning envelops its victims in difficulties; ingenuity helps them out of them. Cunning is the offspring of selfishness; ingenuity is the child or companion of practical wisdom. He took his boat safely over a great many mill-dams during his life, but always by an expedient.

He was a religious man. The fact may be stated without any reservation—with only an explanation. He believed in God, and in his personal supervision of the affairs of men. He believed himself to be under his control and guidance. He believed in the power and ultimate triumph of the right, through his belief in God. This unwavering faith in a Divine

Providence began at his mother's knee, and ran like a thread of gold through all the inner experiences of his life. His constant sense of human duty was one of the forms by which his faith manifested itself. His conscience took a broader grasp than the simple apprehension of right and wrong. He recognized an immediate relation between God and himself, in all the actions and passions of his life. He was not professedly a Christian-that is, he subscribed to no creed,— joined no organization of Christian disciples. He spoke little then, perhaps less than he did afterward, and always sparingly, of his religious belief and experiences; but that he had a deep religious life, sometimes imbued with superstition, there is no doubt. We guess at a mountain of marble by the outcropping ledges that hide their whiteness among the ferns.

At this period of his life he had not exhibited in any form that has been preserved, those logical and reasoning powers that so greatly distinguished him during his subsequent public career. The little clubs at and around New Salem where he "practiced polemics" kept no records, and have published no reports. The long talks in Offutt's store, on the flat-boat, on the farm and by the cabin fireside have not been preserved; but there is no doubt that the germ of the power was within him, and that the peculiarity of his education developed it into the remarkable and unique faculty which did much to distinguish him among the men of his generation. He had been from a child, in the habit of putting his thoughts into language. He wrote much, and to this fact is doubtless owing his clearness in statement. He could state with great exactness any fact within the range of his knowledge. His knowledge was not great, nor his vocabulary rich, but he could state the details of one by the use of the other with a precision that Daniel Webster never surpassed.

He was a childlike man. No public man of modern days has been fortunate enough to carry into his manhood so much of the directness, truthfulness and simplicity of childhood as distinguished him. He was exactly what he seemed. He was not awkward for a purpose, but because he could not help

it. He did not dress shabbily to win votes, or excite comment, but partly because he was too poor to dress well, and partly because he had no love for dress, or taste in its arrangement. He was not honest because he thought honesty was "the best policy," but because honesty was with him "the natural way of living." With a modest estimate of his own powers, and a still humbler one of his acquisitions, he never assumed to be more or other than he was. A lie in any form seemed impossible to him. He could neither speak one nor act one, and in the light of this fact all the words and acts of his life are to be judged.

If this brief statement of his qualities and powers represents a wonderfully perfect character-so strangely pure and noble that it seems like the sketch of an enthusiast, it is not the writer's fault. Its materials are drawn from the lips of old friends who speak of him with tears-who loved him then as if he were their brother, and who worship his memory with a fond idolatry. It is drawn from such humble materials as composed his early history. He loved all, was kind to all, was without a vice of appetite or passion, was honest, was truthful, was simple, was unselfish, was religious, was intelligent and self-helpful, was all that a good man could desire in a son ready to enter life. We shall see how such a man with such a character entered life, and passed through it.

CHAPTER VI.

SEVERAL of the old acquaintances of Mr. Lincoln speak of his having studied law, or having begun the study of law, previous to 1834. He had doubtless thought of it, and had made it a subject of consideration among his friends. With a vague project of doing this at some time, he had bought a copy of Blackstone at an auction in Springfield, and had looked it over. This fact was enough to furnish a basis for the story; but by his own statement he did not begin the study of his profession until after he had been a member of the legislature.

Two years had passed away since his unsuccessful attempt to be elected a representative of Sangamon County. In the meantime, he had become known more widely. His duties as surveyor had brought him into contact with people in other localities. He had become a political speaker, and, although rather rough and slow and argumentative, was very popular. He had made a few speeches on the condition that the friends. who persuaded him to try the experiment "would not laugh at him." They agreed to the condition, and found no occasion to depart from it.

In 1834, he became again a candidate for the legislature, and was elected by the highest vote cast for any candidate. Major John T. Stuart, whose name has been mentioned as an officer in the Black Hawk war, and whose acquaintance Lincoln made at Beardstown, was also elected. Major Stuart had already conceived the highest opinion of the young man,

canvass for the election, Stuart was himself en

and seeing much of him during the privately advised him to study law. gaged in a large and lucrative legal practice at Springfield. Lincoln said he was poor-that he had no money to buy books, or to live where books might be borrowed and used. Major Stuart offered to lend him all he needed, and he decided to take the kind lawyer's advice, and accept his offer. At the close of the canvass which resulted in his election, he walked to Springfield, borrowed "a load" of books of Stuart, and took them home with him to New Salem. Here he began the study of law in good earnest, though with no preceptor. He studied while he had bread, and then started out on a surveying tour, to win the money that would buy more. One who remembers his habits during this period says that he went, day after day, for weeks, and sat under an oak tree on a hill near New Salem and read, moving around to keep in the shade, as the sun moved. He was so much absorbed that some people thought and said that he was crazy. Not unfre-quently he met and passed his best friends without noticing them. The truth was that he had found the pursuit of his life, and had become very much in earnest.

During Lincoln's campaign, he possessed and rode a horse, to procure which he had quite likely sold his compass and chain, for, as soon as the canvass had closed, he sold a horse, and bought these instruments indispensable to him in the only pursuit by which he could make his living. When the time for the assembling of the legislature approached, Lincoln dropped his law books, shouldered his pack, and, on foot, trudged to Vandalia, then the capital of the state, about a hundred miles, to make his entrance into public life.

His personal appearance at this time must have been some-thing of an improvement upon former days. A gentleman now living in Chicago, then a resident of Coles County,* met him at that time, or very soon afterwards, and says that he was dressed in plain mixed jeans, his coat being of the surtout fashion, which, at that day, and in that part of the country, *U. F. Linder, Esq.