little study made him competent for the work, which he performed for some time with admirable accuracy, if the stories are to be believed. But he had not long enjoyed the mild prosperity of this new career ere an untoward interruption came from a creditor of the extinct grocery firm. This man held one of the notes representing "the national debt," and now levied execution upon Lincoln's horse and surveying instruments. Two friends, however, were at hand in this hour of need, and Bolin Greene and James Short are gratefully remembered as the men who generously furnished, in that actual cash which was so scarce in Illinois, the sums of one hundred and twenty-five dollars and one hundred and twenty dollars respectively, to redeem these essential implements of Lincoln's business.

The summer of 1834 found Lincoln again a candidate for the legislature. He ran as a Whig, but he received and accepted offers of aid from the Democrats, and their votes swelled the flattering measure of his success. It has usually been stated that he led the four successful candidates, the poll standing: Lincoln, 1,376; Dawson, 1,370; Carpenter, 1,170; Stuart, 1,164. But Mr. Herndon adduces evidence that Dawson's number was 1,390, whereby Lincoln is relegated to the second place. Holland tells us that he "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." But the correcting pen

of the later biographer interferes with this dramatic incident also. For it seems that after the result of the election was known Lincoln visited a friend, Coleman Smoot, and said: "Did you vote for me?" "I did," replied Smoot. "Then," said Lincoln, "you must lend me two hundred dollars!" This seemed a peculiar sequitur, for ordinary political logic would have made any money that was to pass between voter and candidate move the other way. Yet Smoot accepted the consequence entailed in part by his own act, and furnished the money, whereby Lincoln was able to purchase a new suit of clothes and to ride in the stage to Vandalia.

The records of this legislature show nothing noteworthy. Lincoln was very inappropriately placed on the Committee on Public Accounts and Expenditures; also it is recorded that he introduced a resolution to obtain for the State a part of the proceeds of the public lands sold within it. What has chiefly interested the chroniclers is, that at this session he first saw Stephen A. Douglas, then a lobbyist, and said of him: "He is the least man I ever saw." Lincoln's part seems to have been rather that of an observer than of an actor. The account given is that he was watching, learning, making acquaintances, prudently preparing for future success, rather than endeavoring to seize it too greedily. In fact, there is reason to believe that his thoughts were intent on far other matter than the shaping of laws and statutes. For to this

period belongs the episode of Ann Rutledge. The two biographers whose personal knowledge is the best regard this as the one real romance of Lincoln's life. Heretofore he had held himself shyly aloof from women's society, but this maiden won his heart. She comes before posterity amid a glamour of rhetorical description, which attributes to her every grace of form and feature, every charm of character and intellect. She was but a schoolgirl of seventeen years when two men became her lovers; a year or more afterward she became engaged to one of them, but before they could be married, he made a somewhat singular excuse for going to New York on family affairs. His absence was prolonged and his letters became few. People said that the girl had been deceived, and Lincoln began to hope that the way was clearing for him. But under the prolonged strain Miss Rutledge's health broke down, and on August 25, 1835, she died of brain fever. Lincoln was allowed to see her as she lay near her end. The effect upon him was grievous. Many declared him crazy, and his friends feared that he might go so far as to take his own life; they watched him closely, and one of them at last kindly took him away from the scene of his sufferings for a while, and bore him constant and cheering company. In time the cloud passed, but it seems certain that on only one or two other occasions in his life did that deep melancholy, which formed a permanent background to his temperament, take such overmastering, such alarming,

and merciless possession of him. He was afflicted sorely with a constitutional tendency to gloom, and the evil haunted him all his life long. Like a dark fog-bank it hung, always dull and threatening, on the verge of his horizon, sometimes rolling heavily down upon him, sometimes drawing off into a more or less remote distance, but never wholly disappearing. Every one saw it in his face and often felt it in his manner, and few pictures of him have been made so bad as not in some degree to present it. The access of it which was brought on by this unhappy love affair was somewhat odd and uncouth in its manifestations, but was so genuine and sincere that one feels that he was truly undergoing the baptism of a great sorrow.

At no other point is there more occasion to note this trait of character, which presents a curious and interesting subject for study. Probably no exhaustive solution is possible. One wanders off into the mystery of human nature, loses his way in the dimness of that which can be felt but cannot be expressed, and becomes aware of even dimmer regions beyond in which it is vain to grope. It is well known that the coarse and rough side of life among the pioneers had its reaction in a reserved and at times morose habit, nearly akin to sadness, at least in those who frequented the wilderness; it was the expression of the influence of the vast, desolate and lonely nature amid which they passed their lives. It is true that Lincoln was never a backwoodsman, and never roved alone for long

periods among the shadowy forests and the limitless prairies, so that their powerful and weird influences, though not altogether remote, never bore upon him in full force; yet their effect was everywhere around him, and through others he imbibed it, for his disposition was sensitive and sympathetic for such purposes. That there was also a simple prosaic physical inducement cannot be denied. Hardship and daily discomfort in all the arrangements of life counted for something, and especially so the bad food, greasy, unwholesome, horribly cooked, enough to afflict an ostrich with the blue devils of dyspepsia. The denizen of the town devoured messes vastly worse than the simple meal of the hunter and trapper, and did not counteract the ill effect by hard exercise in the free, inspiring air. Such facts must be considered, though they diminish the poetry which rhetoricians and sentimentalists have cast over the melancholy of Lincoln's temperament. Yet they fall far short of wholly accounting for a gloom which many have loved to attribute to the mysticism of a great destiny, as though the awful weight of his immense task was making itself felt in his strange, brooding nature long years before any human prophet could have forecast any part of that which was to come. In this apparent vague consciousness of the oppression of a great burden of toil, duty, and responsibility, casting its shadow so far before, there is something so fascinating to the imagination of man, that we cannot quite forego