viewed it with alarm. "Since I began this letter," he wrote to a friend, "a messenger came to tell me that Bob was lost; but by the time I reached the house, his mother had found him and had him whipped, and by now, very likely he is run away again."

When this same Bob was bitten by a dog, his anxious and always superstitious father dropped everything and took him to Indiana that a wonderful madstone in that state might be applied to the wound. The boys could go to his office and pull down the law books, scatter legal documents over the floor, and bend the points of the pens without ruffling his temper, however much they annoyed his partner.

For Lincoln, the office was merely a shelter and a lounging place, with a chair to sit on and a sofa worn by use to fit his reclining body. His mind was orderly in a remarkable degree. His thought was clear and straight. He always knew just where to find anything in the carefully arranged compartments of his well-stocked head. His memory was most trustworthy. He made no notes in preparing his cases. A desk was a good enough foot-rest for him, but that was all. He would rather write on his knee, while his hat was sufficiently large to accommodate his letters and the memoranda of his thoughts, which he made from time to time on bits of paper.

!

"When I received your letter," he wrote to a client, "I put it in my old hat, and, buying a new one the next day, the old one was laid aside and the letter was lost sight of for a time." Usually when the hat became crowded, he dumped its varied contents in a pile and labelled it thus, "When you can't find it anywhere else, look in this." He never kept any books or accounts. If he received a fee in the absence of his partner, he would carefully divide it at once, wrap up the latter's share, mark it "Herndon's half," and place it in the drawer. Lincoln liked to lie on the sofa and read the newspapers, and to the distraction of his partner read aloud, because, as he explained, in that way he took in what he was reading by the ear as well as by the eye. He was not, however, a regular reader of books, except for some special purpose which he had in hand. He knew the Bible well, and he knew much of Shakespeare. He was fond of Burns and Milton. Beyond these great works, from which he could recite long passages, he never went far in the field of literature.

"Immortality," that morbidly mournful poem with its familiar line,

"Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?" remained to the end the oft-quoted and favorite expression of his melancholy nature.

He took no interest in local gossip and no part in local rivalries. He was indifferent to town and county politics. He never held aloof, however, from his townsfolk. On the contrary, he was always a sympathetic sharer in their pleasures and their troubles, ever ready to lend a hand to a neighbor in need. One of the last criminal cases he tried was undertaken for a humble friend, in the midst of absorbing political activities.

The son of that Jack Armstrong, the champion of Clary's Grove, whose loyal friendship Lincoln had won by whipping him in open battle at New Salem, was on trial for killing a man. Jack was in his grave, but his widow turned to Lincoln to save her boy. He gratefully remembered that the poor woman had been almost a mother to him in his friendless days and that her cabin had been his home when he had no other. He laid aside all else now and went to her aid. The defendant's

guilt was extremely doubtful.

The chief witness testified that he saw the boy strike the fatal blow and that the scene occurred about eleven o'clock at night. Lincoln inquired how he could have seen so clearly at that late hour. "By the moonlight," the witness answered. "Was there light enough to see everything that happened?" Lincoln asked.

"The moon was about in the same place the sun would be at ten o'clock in the morning and nearly full," the man on the stand replied.

Almost instantly Lincoln held out a calendar. By this he showed that on the night in question, the moon was only slightly past its first quarter, that it set within an hour after the fatal occurrence, and that it could, therefore, have shed little or no light on the scene of the alleged murder. The crowded court was electrified by the disclosure.

"Hannah," whispered Lincoln as he turned to the mother, "Bill will be cleared before sundown."

Then, addressing the jury, he told them how he had come to the bay's defence, not as a hired attorney, but to discharge a debt of friendship incurred in the days when friends were few. With genuine feeling he summoned up the picture of the simple past, the old log-cabin of the Armstrongs', where the good woman now beside him in her silvered locks had taken him in, and given him food and shelter, and how she mended his tattered clothes while he rocked Bill to sleep in the cradle.

Every member of the jury loved Lincoln and honored him. With tears of sympathy flowing down their cheeks, they gladly gave him the verdict which, with his whole heart, he begged from their hands.

CHAPTER XIII

CALLED TO HIS LIFE MISSION

The repeal of the Missouri Compromise passed by the Senate and celebrated by the firing of cannon, March 4, 1854. — The North's rude awakening. Compromise, the old policy of the nation, thrown to the winds. Slavery threatening the free soil of the West. The Kansas-Nebraska Act and Senator Stephen A. Douglas's popular sovereignty plan. - Lincoln stirred as never before. His first debates with Douglas. · Lincoln gave way to Lyman Trumbull, who was elected to the Senate in 1855. The famous "Lost Speech" delivered at Bloomington, Illinois, May 29, 1856, when reporters forgot their duty as they sat bound in the spell of Lincoln's earnestness. Lincoln's name presented for Vice-president to the first Republican National Convention in 1856.- How he received the news.

THE iron-throated cannon of the Washington Navy Yard, which, exulting over the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, broke the stillness of the dawn of a March day in the year 1854, was the signal gun that awakened the sleeping nation to the last great conflict between freedom and slavery. While it proclaimed to the South the promise of more slave territory and more slave states, the North was rudely startled from its dream of peace and security. Its echo, rolling over mountain and plain, called Lincoln to his life mission.