By this combination, or trust, they gained a monopoly of the trade of New Salem, and, after the fashion of high finance in a later day, they had done it all without a cent of cash. In each case they gave their notes, their promises to pay. Credit was the life of business on the frontier, for currency seldom was seen there, and personal notes passed from hand to hand almost as readily as treasury notes in our day.

In his tan brogans, blue yarn socks, broad-brimmed, low-crowned straw hat without a band, and usually with only one suspender on his trousers, Lincoln did not look like a financial magnate or a merchant prince. He went to live at the tavern, a log structure of four rooms, where all the men lodgers slept together, and where he delighted to meet the travelers, who tarried there on the stage route. When the place was crowded, he good-naturedly relieved the landlord by sleeping on a counter in his store.

Storekeeping again failed to interest Lincoln. He continued to be a student of men and books. By a strange chance one book came to him, which probably fixed his course in life. The firm, in its readiness for a trade, bought from a stranger a barrel of odds and ends. While Lincoln was searching through its varied contents with his long arm, he fished out a copy of Blackstone's commentaries on

the common law. He was fascinated by the very sight of it, and day after day pored over its pages as he lay on the ground near the store, his feet resting high against the trunk of a tree, and his body wriggling around to keep in the shade. Meanwhile his partner was giving most of his attention to the rear of the store where the liquors were kept, for all country stores in those times sold liquor, though in this one there was no bar.

In a few months the firm was dissolved and the store was sold, the purchaser, of course, indorsing and promising to pay the notes of Lincoln and his partner. After a little while, however, the new man fled, Lincoln's old partner died, and Lincoln alone stood responsible for the total indebtedness, an obligation so heavy that he always spoke of it as the "national debt." He had shown himself a poor business man, it is true, but he bravely faced his responsibility. He did not run away from it or try to beg off.

"That debt was the greatest obstacle I have ever met in life," he said after many years. He owed $1100 and he had no way to get money except by hard labor at a small wage. He went to his creditors and told them if they would wait, he would give them all he could earn above the cost of living as fast as he could earn it, and thus work out the last

indeed, that his friends were alarmed for his health. He gained repute for his accuracy in his new work, and this, with the natural fairness of his mind, won respect for the young surveyor's decisions regarding disputed boundary lines. One day, when he was surveying a piece of land over which there was a long-standing quarrel, he put his stick into the ground and said, "Here is the corner." A man dug in the earth, and the by-standers were astonished to see him uncover the buried mark, which years before, the original surveyors of the national government had placed at the exact spot indicated by Lincoln.

at ease.

For the first time in his life, he had a right to feel He was making a living and at the same time preparing himself for the future. Then once more, the shadow of misfortune fell across his path. A stranger, who had come into possession of one of his notes given in purchase of a store, sued him and seized his horse, saddle, bridle and all, and, worse still, his surveying instruments. It was a dark hour, filled with humiliation. A friend, however, came to the rescue and saved him, by buying in the property and handing it back to him.

Lincoln never lacked a friend and never forgot one. A man in New Salem who had trusted him for board was himself homeless in his old

age.

Lincoln, with his gratitude still warm after many years, went to the distant part of the state, where his one-time benefactor was an inmate of a poorhouse, took him from the place and found a good home for him. The friendships he made along the Sangamon, amid the struggles of his early manhood, when he had neither fortune nor fame, stood the tests of time and change and lasted through life. They were the corner-stone of his success.

CHAPTER VII

IN THE LEGISLATURE

Elected a Representative in 1834. - Borrowing money with which to clothe himself and going to Vandalia, then the capital of Illinois. — First meeting with Stephen A. Douglas. - Lincoln a member of Henry Clay's Whig party. - Favoring woman's suffrage. — An early joint debate. Reëlected to the Legislature in 1836, 1838, and in 1840.-Whig candidate for Speaker. Leader of his party in the House. Fighting for removal of the capital to Springfield. - Wild legislation. - Lincoln taking his stand against slavery in the session of 1837, only one member in sympathy with him.

LINCOLN was no longer a stranger, when, for the second time, he announced himself a candidate for the Legislature. He now made a general canvass, visiting as many of the voters as he could in their homes and in their fields, eating with them and laughing with them.

Newspapers then were few and little read. Candidates, therefore, could not make themselves and their opinions known to the voters except by going among them in person. Lincoln showed himself a good campaigner, always ready for any situation. At one farm where he stopped, it was harvest time and the farmer was in no mood to talk politics. He bluntly told the young politician he judged a man by the