his parents in constructing another rude habitation, which had neither doors nor windows, and through which swept the rains of summer and the snows of winter. He worked either with his father in an effort to make a clearing in the woods, upon which might be raised food for the family, or else tramped miles to work as a farm-hand for distant neighbors, giving his wages, which were ever so limited, into the family fund. Sickness carried off his mother, a good woman, but uneducated, who did the best she could and probably died from the privations of frontier life. Then, abandoning their farm, the family moved again to Illinois. Here he once more did his best to build a rude home for the family, and the rails which he split for a fence were thirty years afterward carried into the Illinois Convention which presented him as a candidate for President, and in the campaign after his nomination took rank with the things which captured the popular mind in the "Tippecanoe and Tyler too" campaign of General Harrison, and the "Mill boy of the Slashes," which kept the name of Henry Clay a household word. At twenty-one, putting all his earthly belongings into a handkerchief tied to a stick, he tramped to the village of Salem to make his own way in the world. He became a clerk in a country store, at ten dollars a month. He, with other young men, built a flatboat and stocked it with some things on credit and floated down to New Orleans. That visit was one of the milestones in his career. He wandered one day into the market-place, where slaves were being publicly sold. There was a beautiful octoroon girl on the block. The auctioneer was calling off her physical perfections. A rough crowd of brutal men were exchanging, with their bids, lecherous jokes about her. Lincoln, a tall, ungainly, ill-clad flatboat man, shook his fist at the exhibition and said, "If I ever get a chance, I will hit that thing hard." The remark matured subsequently in the Proclamation of Emancipation. He and a friend bought a grocery store upon credit. It was slimly stocked, and they were cheated in the bargain, in giving eight hundred dollars for the goods. His partner took to drink and became a confirmed drunkard, while Lincoln neglected customers to read and study such few books as he could borrow. The goods disappeared and the firm became bankrupt without any assets. Then Lincoln studied surveying. He managed to secure the necessary instruments and a horse and buggy, and travelled the country, fixing boundary lines between farmers' lands and staking out streets of budding villages and towns. When he had paid for his outfit, misfortune again befell him. The notes which he and his partner gave for the store had been sold immediately at a tremendous discount, and then bought up subsequently by a Shylock money lender for a few dollars. This money lender now secured judgment, levied upon and sold Lincoln's horse, wagon, surveying instruments, and everything which he possessed. The neighbors were so shocked that they refused to bid, and a friend bought in the outfit, at a small price, and loaned it to Lincoln to pursue his profession. So that, at twenty-five, after all these sad experiences on the farm, the flatboat, and the grocery, he found himself in debt. It would have been easy to have escaped that obligation. He was so advised by his friends, but the answer, which was characteristic of his life and characteristic of one of the most honest of minds, was, "I promised to pay." It was many years before he was able to clear off that obligation. About this time a young lady of beauty, family, and culture, to whom he was engaged, contracted a fatal illness, and died in his presence. His friends feared he would lose his mind with grief. It was a sorrow which pursued him for years, and from which he never entirely recovered. He now, burdened with debt and almost crushed with this pathetic tragedy, practically started anew at twenty-six to study law. In these days a young man, before he can be admitted to the bar, must have an education of the common school and high school or academy, which means years of study and opportunity for study. Before he can be admitted to the great law schools he must have received a degree in a college of liberal learning, and then before he can be graduated from the law school he must spend four years in hard work. Lincoln became a great lawyer, but think of his equipment when he began to study! He had only about four months of schooling under five different teachers, scattered over several years, and at no period over three weeks at a time. None of these teachers was equipped beyond reading, writing, and simple arithmetic. During his life on the farm he had borrowed every book there was in those frontier neighborhoods. The family Bible he read over and over again. A Justice of the Peace had the "Revised Statutes of Indiana," and that he read with the same thoroughness. The family moved from Indiana to Illinois, where the settlements were closer, and when he came to the village of Salem, he succeeded in borrowing Shakespeare, Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," Esop's "Fables," Weems' "Life of Washington," and a crude "History of the United States." He read while following the plow-to the disgust of his employer-on moonlight nights, lying upon his back in the fields, while going to and from his work, while on the flatboat, while a clerk, and while a merchant. He had no teacher of style or composition. There was little paper in the wilderness, but he wrote compositions on the wooden snow shovel with a piece of charcoal, and rubbed it off and re-wrote, until he had secured by these crude methods and by the teachings of the Bible, Shakespeare, and Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," that wonderful style in sinewy English which contributed to our literature two of its rarest gems, the Gettysburg Speech, and the Second Inaugural Address. The following is an illustration of his difficulties in finding books for which he was hungry: The rain came through the roof of the log cabin and ruined Weems' "Life of Washington," which he had borrowed from a distant farmer. This is the "Life" now entirely out of print, in which is the story of the hatchet and the cherry tree-a story that has not found its way into the regular Histories or any other "Life of Washington." It is a story, though, which does more to keep alive in the schools the memory of the Father of his Country, and which has led to more humor, more or less good, than any other incident in his life. Lincoln, with a sad heart, returned the drenched volume to its owner, who made him work in the fields at twenty-five cents a day until the price which it originally cost had been paid up. Lincoln possessed one of the most logical of minds and a singular faculty of grasping all the facts, and so marshalling them as to be irresistible in debate. He had that rarest gift of the lawyer-the talent to sift vast accumulations of material, testimony, and precedents, until he had hit upon and elucidated the real point upon which rested the success or failure of the case. He impressed these readings upon his mind by making speeches to the horse or the oxen he was driving, to the woods through which he was walking to his work, and at the noonday hour in the fields he would mount a fence and spout his reflections to his fellow-workers. A lawyer loaned him Blackstone's "Commentaries" in four volumes. Every odd moment from hard work of every kind, necessary to secure the money for a living, was given to the study of this and other elementary works, until he had thoroughly mastered them and the principles of law. He finally was admitted to the bar, but in training, culture, and equipment he differed from most of his associates. Not only that, but his ethics of practice were antagonistic to those of all with whom he came in contact. A case which he believed wrong, he would not take. If, during the course of his investigations, he learned that his client had deceived him, he would decline to proceed. He cared little for money, and his charges were only sufficient for his limited necessities. Much of his practice was on behalf of the poor whom he thought wronged and from whom he could expect no reward. Without the opportunities of the law school or the law office, without the reading of a well-equipped library, he was always deficient in ability to cite precedents and decisions upon which the bar and the bench so largely depend. But he knew by heart the principles of the common law, and, because of his years of communion with the plain people, he was more familiar with ordinary human nature than any man in his Circuit. With the ability to make difficult things plain to the humblest understanding, and to clarify the most murky atmosphere of conflicting testimony, he added humor and a |