most, until a late hour." His step-brother, John Johnston, he aided for many years. His help did not always take the form of money. Johnston was shiftless and always in debt, and consequently restless and discontented. In 1851 he was determined to borrow money or sell his farm, and move to Missouri. He proposed to Mr. Lincoln that he lend him eighty dollars. Mr. Lincoln answered:

"What I propose is, that you shall go to work, 'tooth and nail,' for somebody who will give you money for it. . . . I now promise you, that for every dollar you will, between this and the first of May, get for your own labor, either in money or as your own indebtedness, I will then give you one other dollar. . . . In this I do not mean you shall go off to St. Louis, or the lead mines, or the gold mines in California, but I mean for you to go at it for the best wages you can get close to home in Coles County. Now, if you will do this, you will be soon out of debt, and, what is better, you will have a habit that will keep you from getting in debt again. But, if I should now clear you out of debt, next year you would be just as deep in as ever. You say you would almost give your place in Heaven for seventy or eighty dollars. Then you value your place in Heaven very cheap, for I am sure you can, with the offer I make, get the seventy or eighty dollars for four or five months' work."

A few months later Lincoln wrote Johnston in regard to his contemplated move to Missouri:

"What can you do in Missouri better than here? Is the land any richer? Can you there, any more than here, raise corn and wheat and oats without work? Will anybody there, any more than here, do your work for you? If you intend to go to work, there is no better place than right where you are; if you do not intend to go to work, you cannot

get along anywhere. Squirming and crawling about from place to place can do no good. You have raised no crop this year; and what you really want is to sell the land, get the money, and spend it. Part with the land you have, and, my life upon it, you will never after own a spot big enough to bury you in. Half you will get for the land you will spend in moving to Missouri, and the other half you will eat, drink, and wear out, and no foot of land will be bought. Now, I feel it my duty to have no hand in such a piece of foolery."

All this plain advice did not prevent Johnston trying to sell a small piece of land on which Mr. Lincoln had paid the mortgage in order to secure it to his stepmother during her life. When Mr. Lincoln received this proposition he replied:

"Your proposal about selling the east forty acres of land is all that I want or could claim for myself; but I am not satisfied with it on mother's account. I want her to have her living, and I feel that it is my duty, to some extent, to see that she is not wronged. She had a right of dower (that is, the use of one-third for life) in the other two forties; but, it seems, she has already let you take that, hook and line. She now has the use of the whole of the east forty as long as she lives, and if it be sold, of course she is entitled to the interest on all the money it brings as long as she lives; but you propose to sell it for three hundred dollars, take one hundred away with you, and leave her two hundred at eight per cent., making her the enormous sum of sixteen dollars a year. Now, if you are satisfied with treating her in that way, I am not. It is true that you are to have that forty for two hundred dollars at mother's death; but you are not to have it before. I am confident that land can be made to produce for mother at least thirty dollars a year, and I cannot, to oblige any living person, consent that she shall be put on an allowance of sixteen dollars a year."

It was these obligations which made Lincoln resume at once the practice of the law. He decided to remain in Springfield, although he had an opportunity to go in with a well-established Chicago lawyer. For many reasons life in Springfield was satisfactory to him. He had bought a home there in 1844, and was deeply attached to it. There, too, he was surrounded by scores of friends who had known him since his first appearance in the town, and to many of whom he was related by marriage; and he had the good-will of the community. In short, he was a part of Springfield. The very children knew him. "My first strong impression of Mr. Lincoln," says a lady of Springfield, "was made by one of his kind deeds. I was going with a little friend for my first trip alone on the railroad cars. It was an epoch of my life. I had planned for it and dreamed of it for weeks. The day I was to go came, but as the hour of the train approached, the hackman, through some neglect, failed to call for my trunk. As the minutes went on, I realized, in a panic of grief, that I should miss the train. I was standing by the gate, my hat and gloves on, sobbing as if my heart would break, when Mr. Lincoln came by.

"Why, what's the matter?' he asked, and I poured out all my story.

"How big's the trunk? There's still time, if it isn't too big.' And he pushed through the gate and up to the door. My mother and I took him up to my room, where my little old-fashioned trunk stood, locked and tied. 'Oh, ho,' he cried; 'wipe your eyes and come on quick.' And before I knew what he was

going to do, he had shouldered the trunk, was down stairs, and striding out of the yard. Down the street he went, fast as his long legs could carry him, I trotting behind, drying my tears as I went. We reached the station in time. Mr. Lincoln put me on the train, kissed me good-bye, and told me to have a good time. It was just like him."

This sensitiveness to a child's wants made Mr. Lincoln a most indulgent father. He continually carried his boys about with him, and their pranks, even when they approached rebellion, seemed to be an endless delight to him. Like most boys, they loved to run away, and neighbors of the Lincolns tell many tales of Mr. Lincoln's captures of the culprits. One of the prettiest of all these is a story told of an escape Willie once made, when three or four years old, from the hands of his mother, who was giving him a tubbing. He scampered out of the door without the vestige of a garment on him, flew up the street, slipped under a fence into a great green field, and took across it. Mr. Lincoln was sitting on the porch and discovered the pink and white runaway as he was cutting across the greensward. He stood up, laughing aloud, while the mother entreated him to go in pursuit; then he started in chase. Half-way across the field he caught the child and, gathering him up in his long arms, he covered his rosy form with kisses. Then, mounting him on his back, the chubby legs around his neck, he rode him back to his mother and his tub.

It was a frequent custom with Lincoln, this of carrying his children on his shoulders. He rarely went down street that he did not have one of his

younger boys thus mounted, while another hung to the tail of his long coat. The antics of the boys with their father, and the species of tyranny they exercised over him, are still subjects of talk in Springfield. Mr. Roland Diller, who was a neighbor of Mr. Lincoln, tells one of the best of the stories. He was called to the door one day by hearing a great noise of children crying, and there was Mr. Lincoln striding by with the boys, both of whom were wailing aloud. "Why, Mr. Lincoln, what's the matter with the boys?" he asked.

"Just what's the matter with the whole world," Lincoln replied; "I've got three walnuts and each wants two.'

Another of Lincoln's Springfield acquaintances, the Rev. Mr. Alcott of Elgin, Ill., tells of seeing him coming away from church, unusually early one Sunday morning. "The sermon could not have been more than half way through," says Mr. Alcott. ""Tad' was slung across his left arm like a pair of saddlebags, and Mr. Lincoln was striding along with long, and deliberate steps toward his home. On one of the street corners he encountered a group of his fellowtownsmen. Mr. Lincoln anticipated the question which was about to be put by the group, and, taking his figure of speech from practices with which they were familiar, said: 'Gentlemen, I entered this colt, but he kicked around so I had to withdraw him.'

There was no institution in Springfield in which Lincoln had not taken an active interest in the first years of his residence; and now that he had decided to remain in the town, he resumed all his old relations,