seat, some fifteen miles away, and listen to lawyers argue. For days afterward he would be a lawyer, holding mock trials in the fields and delivering speeches from stumps, while the other hands gathered around him, to the indignation of the farmer.

Only one newspaper came to the neighboring village, and Lincoln delighted to go to the store and read aloud to the unlettered throng its reports of debates in Congress and its news from the great world. Some of his views startled the entire countryside. He insisted, for instance, the earth was round, that the sun did not move, and that the moon did not come up or go down, but that instead "we do the sinking."

Hating to see even dumb creatures mistreated, he wrote an essay on "Cruelty to Animals," although many years were to pass before the first society was formed in their defence. He wrote a paper on "Temperance," although there was yet no organized movement in that direction and the very word was without meaning to the average person.

Humor mingled with earnestness in the nature of the youth. He joked and frolicked as well as studied and argued. He wrote rhymes on passing events and sometimes had to back up his rough satires with his big fists. He celebrated in verse the long, crooked nose of the man who made him

work out the damage to the borrowed book, and took revenge in the same way when he was not invited to a wedding in the family of the rich man of the village. If he began to tell stories at the cross-roads store, the loungers crowded the place, and sometimes he held his roaring audience until midnight.

All the while he longed for the wider world without; but he respected his father's right to his labor. He eagerly welcomed the chance to go down to the river to help the ferryman in the roughest toil at thirty-seven cents a day, for there he was at last on the great highway of trade and travel. While working on the river, he found his way to a lawyer's library, where he could read half the night.

In those surroundings he wrote a paper on the "American Government," in which he urged the necessity of preserving the Constitution and maintaining the Union. The lawyer, when he had read this appeal, declared the "world couldn't beat it," and would have taken him into his office, only the youth insisted his parents were so poor they could not spare him as a breadwinner.

When a flatboatman offered him $8 a month, he went as bow-hand, and thus standing forward, poled the craft down the Ohio and the Mississippi to New

Orleans. While idling about the river before starting on that voyage, a little incident happened which he always described as an important event in his life. It is the story of the way he earned his first dollar by taking two men and their trunks to a steamer which waited for them in midstream.

"I was about eighteen years of age," he said, "and belonged, as you know, to what they call down South the 'scrubs.' I was very glad to have the chance of earning something, and supposed each of the men would give me a couple of bits. I sculled them out to the steamer. They got on board, and I lifted the trunks and put them on the deck. The steamer was about to put on steam again, when I called out, 'You have forgotten to pay me.' Each of them took from his pocket a silver half-dollar and threw it on the bottom of my boat.

"You may think it was a very little thing, and in these days it seems to me like a trifle, but it was a most important incident in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, the poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day; that by honest work I had earned a dollar. I was a more hopeful and thoughtful boy from that time.”

When Abraham came of age, his father decided to leave Indiana. The son could no longer be

expected to stay on the unpromising farm in the timber, and his sister had lately died in young wifehood. One of the Hankses had gone to the new state of Illinois, and his reports of the country induced the Lincolns to follow him.

The people generally were sorry to lose the young man whose strong hands always had been ready to help any one in need and whose droll ways had made him the favorite character in the community. As he was leaving the dreary scene of so much sadness and struggle, a boyhood companion planted a cedar in memory of him, and that little tree was the first monument raised in honor of Abraham Lincoln.

ON THE PRAIRIES OF ILLINOIS

The Lincolns leave Indiana for Illinois, March, 1830, Abraham driving his father's ox team. Building the new home on the Sangamon, and splitting rails for a fence. Bidding farewell to the humble roof of his parents. - Once more a flatboatman in 1831. His strange introduction to New Salem. — Stirred to indignation by the sight of a slave auction in New Orleans. - Keeping store in New Salem, where he arrived in the summer of 1831. Winning the title of "Honest Abe." Battling with frontier roughs. — Failure of the store. Studying and dreaming.

IN moving to Illinois, Thomas Lincoln resumed the westward journey which his ancestor had begun at Plymouth Rock and which had continued through seven generations of Lincolns.

An ox team drew the family and its scanty possessions from Indiana to Illinois, and Abraham was the driver. The wagon wheels were without spokes, being mere rounded blocks of wood, cut from the trunk of an oak tree, and with a hole in the center for the axle. There were neither roads nor bridges. Creeks and rivers had to be forded. The trails through the Hoosier forests were broken by the February thaw, while the prairies of Illinois were a sea of mud.