memorial. As soon as he had uttered the last word, Mr. Lincoln asked eagerly,

"Mr. Blank, how tall are you?"

The clergyman turned scarlet and looked around at his colleagues in amazement.

"I believe I am taller than you," continued the President. "What is your height?"

"Six feet three inches," responded the divine with evident irritation.

"Then I outmeasure you by an inch," said Mr. Lincoln with a satisfied air, and proceeded to explain the situation as to slavery.

A similar scene occurred on another occasion when, however, the visitor happened to be a trifle taller than the President. One of his friends who was present says that the latter showed more irritation than he had ever seen him exhibit before; nor did he forget it, but the next time his friend called he referred to the matter and remarked that he considered himself the tallest man in Washington, although he didn't pretend to be as handsome as General Scott.

When the notification committee came from the Chicago Convention to his home at Springfield, they were presented one after another to their candidate, and, as Governor E. D. Morgan, of New York, reached him, he asked his height and weight. Mr. Morgan gave the information with some amusement, whereupon Lincoln remarked,

"You are the heavier, but I am the taller."

In 1859, when he went to Milwaukee to deliver an address at a State fair, a cannon-ball tosser in a sideshow interested him more than anything else on the grounds. Lincoln insisted upon testing the weights he handled, and was quite chagrined because he was not able to throw them about as easily as the professional. As they parted he remarked in his droll way,

"You can outlift me, but I could lick salt off the top of your hat."

Thomas Lincoln did not remain long at his home on the bluffs overlooking the Sangamon River. He was always afflicted with the fever of unrest. Like so many of his class, he continued to advance westward, keeping on the skirmish line of the frontier. He removed three times after he came to Illinois in search of better luck, and never found it. He owned three farms, but never paid for any of them, and was always growing poorer and signing larger mortgages. Finally, when he had reached the end of his credit, Lincoln bought him a tract of forty acres near Farmington, Coles County, where he lived until January 17, 1851, long enough to enjoy the satisfaction of seeing his son one of the foremost men in the State. He was buried near the little hamlet. His wife survived both him and her famous step-son, and was tenderly cared for as long as the latter lived. Before starting for his inauguration he paid her a visit, in February, 1861, when they spent the day in affectionate companionship. She had a presentiment that she should never see him again and told him so, but neither dreamed that he would die first. She lived until April, 1869, a pious, gentle, intelligent, and well-loved woman, and was buried beside her husband. Robert T. Lincoln has erected a monument over their graves.

John Johnston, Lincoln's step-brother, was an honest, but uneasy and shiftless man, and gave him a great deal of trouble. He lived with his mother and step-father most of his life, but never contributed much to their support, and was always in debt, although Lincoln several times give him means to make a fresh start. Lincoln's letters to his step-brother, several of which have been preserved, throw considerable light upon his character.

In 1851, after Thomas Lincoln's death, Johnston proposed to leave his mother and go to Missouri, where he thought he could do better than in Illinois, and asked

permission to sell the farm which Lincoln had bought to secure his step-mother a home for life.

"You propose to sell it for three hundred dollars," wrote Lincoln in his indignation, "take one hundred dollars away with you, and leave her two hundred dollars at eight per cent., making her the enormous sum of sixteen dollars a year. Now, if you are satisfied with seeing her in that way I am not."

Then Johnston proposed that Lincoln should lend him eighty dollars to pay his expenses to Missouri.

"You say you would give your place in heaven for seventy or eighty dollars," Lincoln wrote his stepbrother. "Then you value your place in heaven very cheap, for I am sure you can, with the offer I make, get seventy or eighty dollars for four or five months' work. 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 that you shall go off to St. Louis, or the lead mines in California, but I mean for you to go at it for the best wages you can get close at home in Coles County. Now, if you will do this, you will soon be 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 as ever."

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

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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 you 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."

Shortly after leaving his father's primitive home in the spring of 1831, Lincoln obtained employment with Denton Offutt, a trader and speculator, who, having heard that he had already made a voyage on a flat-boat from Indiana to New Orleans, engaged him for a similar expedition, in company with John D. Johnston, his stepbrother, and John Hanks, his cousin, for twelve dollars a month each with their return expenses. It took some time to build the boat, and at the very beginning of the voyage it stuck midway across a dam at the village of New Salem. The bow was high in the air, the stern was low in the water, and shipwreck seemed absolutely certain when Lincoln's ingenuity rescued the craft. Having unloaded the cargo, he bored a hole in the bottom at the end extending over the dam; then he tilted up the boat and let the water run out. That being done, the boat was easily shoved over the dam and reloaded. This novel exhibition of marine engineering so impressed the inhabitants of the neighborhood that Abraham Lincoln's genius was discussed at every fireside for months thereafter, and he gained a reputation at New Salem that proved to be of great value. He was so much interested in what he had done that twenty years later he developed the idea and applied for a patent for a curious contrivance for lifting flat-boats over shoals. The journey to New Orleans was a valuable expe

rience. Lincoln's first actual contact with the system of slavery made him an abolitionist for life, and the impressions he received were retained throughout his entire career. He returned to St. Louis by steamer, walked across the country to New Salem, and became a clerk in the store of Denton Offutt, measuring calico, weighing out sugar and nails, tending a grist-mill, and making himself useful to his employer and popular with the people.

The following year he engaged in a mercantile adventure on his own account at New Salem which failed disastrously, and found himself loaded with obligations which, in humorous satire upon his own folly, he called "the national debt." His creditors accepted his notes in settlement, and during the next seventeen years he paid them in instalments unto the uttermost farthing, although the terrible responsibility darkened all the days of his life.

"That debt," he once said to a friend, " was the greatest obstacle I have ever met in my life; I had no way of speculating, and could not earn money except by labor, and to earn by labor eleven hundred dollars besides my living seemed the work of a lifetime. There was, however, but one way. I went to the creditors, and told them that if they would let me alone I would give them all I could earn over my living, as fast as I could earn it."

As late as 1849, when a member of Congress, so we are informed by Mr. Herndon, he sent home money saved from his salary to be applied on these obligations. Only a single creditor refused to accept his promises. A man named Van Bergen, who bought one of his notes on speculation, brought suit, obtained judgment against him, and levied upon the horse, saddle, and instruments used by him daily in surveying, and with which, to use his own words, he "kept body and soul together."

James Short, a well-to-do farmer living a few miles