for it not only contained the Constitution of the United States, but it also introduced him to the Declaration of Independence. It held, too, the Ordinance of 1787, by which Indiana and all the country between the Ohio and the Mississippi had been dedicated to freedom in these simple and now familiar terms: "There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." Indeed, that worn and forbidding volume gave him a better understanding of the government of his country than many big schools impart to their pupils. Among his other borrowings was a copy of Weems's "Life of Washington," from which he drew the inspiring lessons of that immortal career and of the War of the Revolution. Those lessons sank deep into his youthful mind. After the lapse of a generation, he recalled in a speech to the men of '61, Weems's stories of the battles fought and hardships endured by the men of '76. "You all know," he said, "for you have all been boys, how these early impressions last longer than any others. I recollect thinking then, boy even though I was, that there must have been something more than common that those men struggled for. I am exceedingly anxious that that thing shall be

perpetuated in accordance with the original idea for which that struggle was made."

He had still another reason for remembering that book. He was so charmed by the tale that he carried it with him when he mounted to his loft, and there he lay in bed and read its pages until his bit of tallow had burned out. Then he poked the volume in a chink in the wall, where he could put his hands on it the minute he woke in the morning. A driving rain in the night came through the cracks and soaked the book. The man who had lent it to him claimed damages and made Lincoln pull fodder in his corn-field for three full days. Nevertheless he went on borrowing right and left, until he felt assured he had read every book within a fifty-mile circle.

His total schooling amounted to much less than a year. He attended from time to time until he was nineteen; but each time his father felt obliged to take him out after a few weeks. When his labor was not required at home, the father was in need of the few cents a day which the boy could earn by working for other farmers, for the wolf of want was always at the door of the Lincoln cabin.

A BOYHOOD OF TOIL

Stories of the giant strength of the youthful Lincoln. - Hired out by his father at twenty-five cents a day. Rated as lazy by his employers, because his heart was not in his rough work while he dreamed of the great world without. - Walking fifteen miles to hear lawyers argue in court and haranguing his fellow-laborers from stumps in the fields. Writing essays on morals and politics. Hailed as the village jester. Became a flatboat

man. How he earned his first dollar. - The earliest monument to Lincoln reared by a boy friend.

LINCOLN's figure shot up rapidly from his eleventh year, and at nineteen he had grown to his full height of six feet, four inches. He was wiry, and of rugged health, swarthy in complexion, and his face was shriveled not unlike that of an old man. The strangely serious look, so marked in his bearing through life, had already come into his countenance.

The unreflecting rustics about him simply set him down as queer, as they saw this youth of strange moods pass in a flash from gay to grave. His tight buckskin breeches were "drawn up" in the rains, until twelve inches of blue, bony shins were exposed in the gap between them and the tops of his low shoes, and on his head he wore a coonskin cap. "Longshanks" was his descriptive nickname. Wonderful stories are told of the giant strength

of his boyhood, of his picking up and moving a chicken house, weighing 600 pounds, and bearing off a great log while three men were disputing as to how they should unite to lift it. "His axe would flash and bite into a sugar tree or a sycamore, Dennis Hanks has said, "and if you heard, him felling trees in a clearing, you would say there were three men at work by the way the trees fell."

Lincoln and his sister were both "hired out" to the more prosperous neighbors, whenever there was a demand for their services. One woman recalled, in her old age, the time when the boy worked for her husband and slept in their loft. She praised him for knowing how "to keep his place" and for not coming where he was not wanted. He would lift his hat and bow when he entered her house, and was tender and kind, "like his sister."

A day's work was from sunrise to sunset, and for this he received a quarter of a dollar, but if he missed any slight part of the long day, he was docked. The reward for his labor did not go to him, however, but to his father, to whom he owed all his time until the noon of his twenty-first birthday. He had no spending money and felt little need of any. Money was not what he longed for. It was not the object of the ambition which gnawed like hunger within him.

Already he stood apart and alone. He was with, but not of, the backwoodsmen, among whom he toiled and jested. His thoughts and his dreams had borne him out of their forest world and far away from the tasks of his hands. His heart was not in hoeing and wood-chopping. He slaughtered hogs, swung the axe and the scythe, and wielded the flail, but he could not put the man into the work. His employers knew it and rightfully found fault. "I say he was awfully lazy," one of them insisted nearly half a century afterward. "He worked for me, but he was always reading and thinking. He said to me one day his father taught him to work, but he didn't teach him to love it."

This man did not take into his calculations the fact that his big, lazy hired hand would walk farther and work harder to get an old book than any one else around him would walk or work to get a new dollar bill. In vain his father tried to get such foolishness out of his son's head and induce him to learn practical things; the boy was a great, strong fellow, and it was time he made something out of himself.

The father was anxious for him to be a carpenter, but he could not excite the young man's enthusiasm. He would do the day's work, as it was given him to do and after his own fashion, and that was all. He would rather, any time, tramp off to the county