goodly array of session laws, legislative reports and Congressional documents.

In this office, still in existence, Lincoln commenced the world in earnest, and passed nearly all his time there, day or night, for he left Speed's room after a little and slept here on the old lounge, of which it might be said

"The lounge contrived a double debt to pay,

A bed at night, a lounger's seat by day."

In that little uninviting village at this time there were but three country taverns, about half a dozen stores of all sorts, a small merchant's mill for custom work, and a community composed of a few families of the most aristocratic tendencies, and the bulk of the citizens exceedingly poor. The streets were wholly unimproved, and in summer were frequently obscured by clouds of dust, and in winter were impassable by reason of mud. There was but little attempt at sidewalks, and these in the part surrounding the public square and the crossings consisted of chunks of wood, upon which in the reign of mud, pedestrians, if well balanced, might pick their way across the "slough of despond," which the streets were from November till March; and yet at that time in this primitive village, there lived Stephen T. Logan, John T. Stuart, Edward D. Baker, Samuel H. Treat, Josiah Lamborn, Jesse B. Thomas, Stephen A. Douglas, Cyrus Walker and others, four of whom have been in Congress, two in the U. S. Senate and others in high offices, besides some of the best lawyers in the West.

The real business of a lawyer in that region, in those early days, occupied but a short time; and they were wont to get together in the back part of the stores in the winter, and on store boxes outside, in the summer, and discuss politics; they being divided into "Jackson" men and Whigs; and politics raging then, where nothing was at stake beyond their prejudices, as effectively and emphatically as in manufacturing communities where politics was business, and brought thrift or leanness to the community; and in this coterie of

lawyers in the years from '37 to '42 Lincoln ranked very nearly at the bottom of the list; indeed, his eccentricities, his outre appearance and propensity to tell stories, gave him his chief distinction.

I have elsewhere adverted to the fact, that on the 27th of May, 1856, Lincoln and I walked to the open space in front of the old Court House at Decatur; and that Lincoln then said to me, in substance: "Here on this spot, twenty-six years ago, I made my first halt in Illinois; here I stood, and there our wagon stood, with all that we owned in the world:" and in point of fact, for a fortnight previously thereto, he had no home, except to lie on the bare earth at night and to eat his rations from a tin pan by the wayside.

For the ensuing year he lived in the rudest style of log cabin on the north fork of the Sangamon (a very prosaic) river; then his father abandoned even that and migrated east, in search of a better chance to live an indolent life; and Lincoln, being then a man for himself, was literally without a home of any sort: so he cast his lot with the few settlers in the rude hamlet of New Salem, where, amid poverty and privation, he studied law under the shade of a tree, in some nook in a store, at the foot of a hay-stack, or where he could, and at night crawled into a loft to sleep, how he could. For six years he lived in a way of which he might almost say: "The foxes have holes, the birds of the air have nests, but I have no place to lay my head." Coming to Springfield under the circumstances stated; he was at first there indebted to charity for a home; his meals being procured from one friend, and his lodgings from another, until he could independently sleep on his own rude lounge, in his own dirty office.

After five years of this desultory life, he married, without 'a home to carry his theretofore pampered and proud-spirited bride, and he took lodgings in a cheap tavern, still standing, at the economical price of four dollars a week.

After a while, he purchased a small one and a half

story residence in an humble part of the town, got him a horse, hired the village blacksmith to construct a buggy, procured a cow and built with his own hands the rude stable I have sketched elsewhere, and then for the first time in all his life-being then thirty-five years of age he had a home, and he did not enjoy it for more than half the time, being away on the circuit, living as best he could, for half the year.

Mrs. Lincoln, during one of his three-months' absences, conspired with their next door neighbor, a carpenter, to raise the roof and add another story; which was done, and this house, modest enough even now, was the only real, genuine home that Lincoln ever had. I have narrated that he expressed a solicitude to me what he should do with his house when he went to Washington: not wishing, as he expressed it, to sell himself "out of house and home," nor wishing to rent it to strangers, who would abuse it. But he finally leased it to Mr. Bowen, superintendent of the Great Western Railway, who occupied it for several years; then one Olroyd, a bookseller, took it and made a sort of Lincoln museum out of it; and finally Robert Lincoln presented it to the state, which properly made Mr. Olroyd its custodian.

When Lincoln took leave of his home in February he had a secret presentiment that he would never see it again; and he did not.

In working his wonders in the moral, no less than in the physical, universe; God works in a mysterious way, wholly incomprehensible to us.

Thus, when in His good Providence, He desired to intervene between man and the broken law, and to redeem him from his fallen state, He chose as the Mediator and Redeemer, one born in a manger-" a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief" the son of a humble carpenter of Nazareth; and when, likewise, He desired, in His good Providence, to extirpate human slavery in this, the only boasted "free coun