discovered what a wealth of pathetic expression could be poured forth through them. Uttered by him as the voice of his suffering, they took into their mournful cadences a power and a majesty borrowed from the grief which drove Abraham Lincoln from the grave of Ann Rutledge broken-hearted and all but insane.

All men in that vicinity well knew the sad, romantic story, and there were no hearts on the Sangamon prairies so hard that they were not touched by the sorrow of their friend and neighbor. His popularity increased daily as he went about among them, thin, haggard, gloomy, and he was more than ever the idol of New Salem. The winter passed away, and then the spring, and another summer brought with it a renewal of political excitement. There was no longer any question as to whether Mr. Lincoln should be elected to the Legislature. Thenceforward his place upon the Whig ticket was a matter of course so long as he should consent to such a use of his name. There was nothing, therefore, to mark for him especially the campaign of 1836, except the fact that he stumped the county and received a greater number of votes than was given to any other candidate who ran for the Legislature that year. In fact, among a population so shifting, changing, growing, he was already becoming one of the older and earlier settlers, and the majority of his fellow-citizens were new men compared to him.

CHAPTER XVI.

BUBBLE LEGISLATION.

An Episode-The Lightning-rod-The Long Nine-State Improvements— Anti-slavery Declarations-1836.

THERE is nothing else on earth so easily to be taken possession of as an empty house, whether or not the new occupant may be or become the owner.

When Lincoln returned to work and to political excitement he also necessarily returned to the society of women. He sorely needed all three, and every other attainable help, to keep his mind in order. It could hardly be called well regulated as yet, and his emotional nature was entirely out of gear. Kind and busy friends, moreover, came to the rescue, and, by their management, in the autumn of 1836 he found himself corresponding with an attractive young lady named Mary Owens. He had not at all forgotten Ann Rutledge, and the matter would be hard to understand if so many of the letters which passed between the two had not been preserved and actually printed. They offer a sufficient explanation, for they make very plain the fact that there was no feeling aroused on either side at all worthy to be spoken of as "love." She was handsome, well educated, intelligent, with enough of good sense to admire a strong and rising man. He was restless, feverish, unsettled, hungry at heart-he did not know for what; and so there grew up an intimacy, a friendship, a protracted, struggling imitation of a courtship and engagement. From the latter they were both finally glad to release each other.

It is entirely just to say of Mr. Lincoln that during that brief period of his life he knew very little of himself. The

continual developments of his nature and its powers must now and then have brought surprises to him, but it is a curious fact that nobody else seems ever to have been greatly surprised. He was a man from whom uncommon performances were expected.

In joke or in earnest, or in somewhat of both, one of the first public utterances in behalf of female suffrage came from his pen. In a printed declaration of his principles, issued during the canvass for that year's election, he said among other things:

"I go for all sharing the privileges of the government who assist in bearing its burdens. Consequently I go for admitting all whites to the right of suffrage who pay taxes or bear arms -by no means excluding females."

The subject was not then under discussion in Illinois, but Mr. Lincoln's after-course proved how prompt and decided was sure to be his response to any appeal to his sense of justice.

The style of his oratory was now rapidly improving, and his speeches became occasional surprises even to those who knew him best and expected most of him. He wasted nothing upon mere display, but then, as afterwards, he exhibited a marvelous capacity for using to advantage the smallest available fact or circumstance within his reach at the moment. The smaller and sharper might be the point of any thrust, the deeper he was apt to drive it home.

A good illustration of this faculty is found in a speech of his, in the campaign of 1836, in reply to a Mr. Forquer. This gentleman had deeply offended all notions of political morality by a recent desertion of the Whigs, and the feeling against him was very bitter. He was a man of wealth and standing, Register of the United States Land Office at Springfield, owning the best "frame house" in that town. From the roof of this residence arose the one solitary lightning-rod in all that part of the State, and it had attracted more than a little popular at tention.

At a political meeting Mr. Lincoln made a speech of more

than common power, to Mr. Forquer's especial disgust and astonishment. He replied ably but superciliously, beginning with the rash assertion that "the young man would have to be taken down." Throughout his remarks he asserted and claimed his personal superiority. Lincoln listened attentively, and at the end of Mr. Forquer's speech he took the stand again. He replied with force and dignity to whatever of argument he had to deal with, but at the conclusion of his remarks he turned upon his lofty opponent with,

"You began your speech by announcing that 'this young man would have to be taken down.""

Turning again to the crowd, he added:

"It is for you, not for me, to say whether I am up or down. The gentleman has alluded to my being a young man. I am older in years than I am in the tricks and trades of politicians.. I desire to live, and I desire place and distinction as a politician; but I would rather die now than, like the gentleman,, live to see the day when I would have to erect a lightning-rod to protect a guilty conscience from an offended God."

Nevertheless that solitary lightning-rod led Mr. Lincoln to a study and knowledge of the laws of electricity. Right there was a difference between him and the other men who stared at the novel iron ornament upon Mr. Forquer's roof. He alone could make a spear of it, in a speech, wherewith to transfix its owner, and then accept it as a directing finger pointing him the way to a new field of scientific inquiry.

He had made such good use of his first term in the Legislature that on his return he at once took rank as an able debater and parliamentarian. He was also skilled in the tactics re quired in securing majorities for his favorite schemes.

The politics of the State had now become more closely connected with those of the country at large.

The subject of State banks, carrying with it all questions of local finance, was interwoven with the management of the United States Treasury and the fate of the United States

Bank. At the same time, the policy of the general government with reference to its sales of public lands was nowhere of more importance than in Illinois.

Mr. Lincoln's brain was teeming more fruitfully than ever with projects for public improvements. The example of New York was continually before him, and he had formed, with reference to the canals of his own State, the high ambition of becoming "the De Witt Clinton of Illinois." There was nothing mean or low in such an aspiration in the mind of a young man who was only separated by five short years from the deck of a flatboat and by less than three from bankruptcy, poverty, and the sheriff's hammer.

He served upon the Committee on Finance. The ideas of State credit entertained by that committee may be gathered from the facts, among many, that for the furtherance of canal and other enterprises laws were passed authorizing loans to the amount of twelve millions of dollars. The money was to be obtained by the sale of State bonds, and was then to be employed in quite a variety of ways. It was fully believed that into the State, improved by that expenditure, a flood of immigration would surely and swiftly roll, to open farms, pay taxes, and so to make the bonds good property in the hands of the imaginary capitalists who were now to buy them. The passage of a "law" creating capitalists for the occasion does not seem to have been thought of, but the nominal capital of the State Bank and of other banks was largely increased, that they might issue abundant notes, and so that "money" might be plentiful.

Small blame rightly attaches to any of the untutored legislators who proposed or voted for all these wonderful schemes for making all men rich at railway speed. They knew no better until, at last, the bursting of their own pretty bubbles, with all the other bubbles the whole nation had been blowing, sent them back to their constituencies sadder and wiser men.

One other project was kept continually in the foreground