measure to his books. A host of mere bookworms could have undeceived him on that point if he could have tested them in attempts to address crowds of miscellaneous hearers. Mr. Posey honestly and earnestly encouraged his queer acquaintance to persevere; but he was quite likely to do that.

The year went by and Abraham Lincoln was still a mere farm-hand, jobbing his strong body to one employer after another. It did not seem that he had climbed a single round of the long ladder of worldly success. But the return of his birthday brought him something new. A man named Denton Offutt hired John Hanks and John Johnston and Abe Lincoln to take a flatboat for him down the Sangamon River all the way from Springfield to New Orleans. He promised them fifty cents a day for the entire trip, with an additional sixty dollars to be divided among them at the end of it. For those times such wages were extraordinary.

The bargain was made in February, and in March the three friends went down the Sangamon from Decatur in a canoe. For some reason they left their boat five miles above the town and walked the rest of the way. They found their employer easily enough, but they also found that he had failed to procure for himself a flatboat for the proposed voyage. If, therefore, they were to go down the river that season they must provide their own shipping. The construction of a flatboat was no formidable affair to men who had been brought up as they had.

They went to the mouth of Spring Creek, five miles north of Springfield, and set to work.

The land they were on and the trees they cut down were still the property of the United States Government, although so near the future capital of the State of Illinois. The logs when cut were rafted down the river, to be sawed into planks at the Sangamontown saw-mill. That work was done in a fortnight, and in two weeks more the industrious trio had their flatboat in the water. All the while they lived in a shanty of their

own making and "boarded themselves." There had been fun along with the hard work, for Abe was the life of the shanty.

There had also been evening strolls into all there was of Sangamontown, and talks, and yarn-spinning, and cracking of jokes with the inhabitants.

Mr. Offutt joined them now, and his cargo was ready for shipment when the flatboat was launched. The State of Illinois at that time raised but little of any other crop than Indian corn, and sent this to market mainly in the shape of pork. The cargo therefore consisted of the favorite grain in both its customary forms, and Mr. Offutt took charge of its management and sale. Very little of it would have reached a southern market, however, if it had not been for the curious ingenuity of the tallest of his three boatmen.

On the 19th of April the boat arrived at New Salem, and at that point there was a mill-dam upon the ridge of which the rude craft floated and stuck fast. Her destruction seemed inevitable, for her stern was sinking, the water was pouring in, and her loose lading was sliding back as the slope of her awkward position increased.

Abe Lincoln at once took command, as if in any time of special trouble the leadership belonged to him. An empty boat was floated alongside, and the cargo was hoisted into it by main strength, until the grounded craft was sufficiently lightened to be set afloat again. Just how he managed to keep her from sinking during that brief period of desperate exertion does not clearly appear.

Before he pulled her off from the dam he rigged some gearing under her stern by means of which she was steadily raised, while the water ran out of her through auger-holes bored in the bottom of the part which hung over the dam. It was Abe's first effort as an inventor, but it set his mind at work in a new direction. Just eight years afterward he sent to the Patent Office at Washington a wooden model, made by him

self, of a contrivance for floating steamers over bars and other obstructions in the western rivers.

New Salem was a small place on a low bluff, and all its inhabitants came out to watch the fate of the stuck flatboat. Great was the admiration expressed for the skill and energy of the man who saved it. Neither he nor they, however, had any idea that for seven long years that very man would himself be "stuck" and stranded in the odd, grotesque, chance-medley existence of New Salem.

Mr. Offutt's gratitude made him enthusiastic; for he vowed that on his return he would build a steamboat to run on the Sangamon. He would provide her with runners for ice and rollers for shoals and dams; and then, "with Abe Lincoln in command of her, by thunder, she would have to go!"

The remainder of the trip was much like any other flatboat voyage down the Mississippi; but at New Orleans and elsewhere Abe received a repetition of his first lessons on slavery. He again saw negroes manacled for sale, maltreated, beaten, and felt that it was neither safe nor useful to enter any protest. No word could be spoken against an iniquity which all men declared to be a great good, and a necessity of Southern life; but a memory could be recorded and put away in the secret treasure-house of the young flatboatman's heart. The day was to come when he should take it out and put it into words so plain, so clear, so strong, that the minds of a million and a half of voters should receive them as a sort of Gospel.

After that was to come yet another day, when his own hands should be laid upon the manacles, in power, and should shatter them, putting an end forever to the buying and selling of men and women in the United States.

The steamboat passage homewards terminated at St. Louis. From that point, all the way up and across the great State of Illinois, to Coles County, Abe Lincoln and John Johnston traveled on foot, leaving Hanks on the road to make his way to Springfield.

The Lincoln family had moved again during Abe's brief absence, but their Coles County settlement proved a permanent

one.

This second experience of river life in the South left the young giant little better off than before in worldly goods, whatever else he may have gained by it. But while he was away his talkative friends had taken good care of his reputation as a man of muscle. They had said so much, indeed, that the champion wrestler of that region, one Daniel Needham, sent him a challenge to a public trial of strength and skill. It was accepted, as a matter of course, and the meeting took place with all the customary prairie formalities; but rarely has a "champion" been more astonished than was Daniel Needham. It was not so much that he was thrown twice in quick succession, but that the thing was done for him with so much apparent ease; and his wrath rose hotly to the fighting point.

"Lincoln," he shouted, "you've thrown me twice, but you can't whip me."

"Needham," said Abe, "are you satisfied I can throw you? Well, if you ain't, and I've got to satisfy you by thrashing you, I'll do that too, for your own good."

The crowd laughed; but the champion gave the matter a sober second thought, and concluded that his own good did not require a mauling from that man. He was entirely satisfied already.

CHAPTER XI.

A STEP UPWARD.

Stranded in New Salem-First Public Employment-Miller, Clerk, and Peace-keeper-A Wrestling Match-1831.

THE mill-dam across the Sangamon River, upon the perilous edge of which Mr. Offutt's flatboat stuck, to be rescued by Abraham Lincoln, is still in existence; but the little hamlet of New Salem has long since disappeared. The hand of time requires but little human aid in the destruction of a score or two of houses built of logs or of pine boards, the best of them at a cost of less than a hundred dollars.

New Salem, however, was something of a business place in the summer of the year 1831. The mill was a great help to it, and it was separated by twenty miles of prairie road from the crushing rivalry of Springfield. That city already contained at least a thousand inhabitants, and no neighboring settlement could hope to compete with it successfully.

The whole population of the prairie country was in a condition of continual drift and change, yet hardly any man could offer a good reason for his restlessness. Whole families floated hither and thither, they knew not why and scarcely how, drawing friends and connections after them.

A solitary, loose-footed laborer, without an ounce of property beyond the shabby clothes he stood in, was a fragment of human driftwood which might be cast ashore almost anywhere by the aimless eddies of such a social state.

Abraham Lincoln, hiring from job to job of uncertain work, was stranded at New Salem about midsummer of the year 1831. He had no definite business there, no settled occupation, no