life. To see this flower fade and die ere it bloomed, filled him with the darkest despair. In his sentiments and emotions, Lincoln remained always a primitive man, a simple backwoodsman. No elevation of mind or station seemed to affect these elements of his nature. His heart was unchanged to the end. He never rose superior to its aches and appeals; he could always cry.

Malaria attacked the settlers in the dank forests and the tillers of the newly turned soil of the virgin land of the West. Lincoln did not escape the disease and this, together with his intellectual isolation and his naturally sensitive disposition, made him a man of dark moods. These he could sometimes disguise or momentarily beguile with jests and laughter, but, in his sluggish physical condition, he seemed powerless to conquer them and throw them off.

He grieved for the dead girl until his friends feared he was losing his mind. Returning to the Legislature he summoned the spirit for carrying on his work there, but he sadly confessed to a fellow-member, "Although I seem to others to enjoy life rapturously, yet when alone I am so overcome by mental depression, I never dare to carry a pocket-knife."

In this somber frame of mind, Lincoln bade

good-by to New Salem. It, too, was dying. The post-office had "winked out," as its quaint postmaster expressed it, and the trade of the place had been diverted to a near-by town. When, with everything he owned in his saddle-bags, he mounted a borrowed horse and rode away to be a lawyer in Springfield, he was even poorer than when he first walked into New Salem, for now he was deep in debt.

He was in his twenty-ninth year, and the lawyer, from whom he had been borrowing law books, offered to take him into his office. Although Springfield was a little town of between one and two thousand population, it had been made the new capital of the state, largely through Lincoln's efforts in the Legislature. The townspeople naturally felt grateful toward him, and the field was a promising

one.

Arrived at Springfield, he ordered a bedstead of the cabinet-maker and then went to a general store to see how much the bedding would cost. The price was seventeen dollars. He sighed and his face took on an added shade of gloom.

"I have not the money to pay," he confessed, "but if you will credit me until Christmas, and my experience here as a lawyer is a success, I will pay you then. If I fail in that, I will probably never pay you at all."

While the storekeeper had no personal acquaintance with him, he had heard him speak and he admired him. His sympathy was aroused by his air of hopeless poverty and he told him, if he would accept it, he would share his bed with him. "Where is your room?" Lincoln inquired. "Upstairs," the proprietor answered.

The forlorn-looking newcomer took his saddlebags on his arm and went up the stairway. Coming down in a few minutes, his face was in a broad smile, as he said, "Well, I'm moved."

There in the room above the store of his generous host, he lodged, while struggling to get a foothold in his new profession. For years his debts hung over him like a black cloud. He felt in honor bound to share every hard-earned dollar with his creditors. Long after the stores for which he contracted the debt had been razed to the ground and New Salem itself had utterly vanished from the earth, he was still paying for them out of his scanty earnings at

the bar.

Friends who knew through what stress he had passed and still was passing, gained a glimpse of the integrity of the man one day when an agent of the Post-office Department appeared in Springfield. This official came to collect a balance of seventeen dollars due the government from Lincoln at the

time he had retired from the postmastership of New Salem. Lincoln stepped over to an old box. in his office and drew forth a sock containing the exact amount in silver and copper coins. There it had reposed, untouched by him, through every temptation of years of pinching need, while he waited for the government to give him a chance to settle. Those who saw the proceeding were amazed, but he simply remarked that he had made it his practice not to spend money belonging to others.

Had Lincoln been able to choose for himself, he could not have found more fortunate headquarters in Springfield than the store over which he slept. In front of the big wood fire there, the rising young men of the town were in the habit of gathering in the evening, and, with his humor and his earnestness, he soon became the center of the company, which included Stephen A. Douglas, who was admitted to practice before the State Supreme Court the same day that Lincoln's name was enrolled; O. H. Browning, afterward a member of President's Cabinet; E. D. Baker, later a Senator from Oregon, and others destined to fame.

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It was an ambitious group, and Baker is said to have burst into tears while reading the Constitution of the United States and finding that he, a native

of England, could never be President. The questions of the hour were warmly debated, and every cause found a champion. Once, when the arguments became unusually heated, Douglas sprang up and challenged his opponents to a public debate, which came off, four on a side, and raged for more than a week. Lincoln was the last speaker, and the world hardly would recognize the Lincoln it knows in the bombast which he delivered on that occasion. "Many free countries have lost their liberties, and ours may lose hers," he declared, "but if she shall, let it be my proudest plume, not that I was the last to desert, but that I never deserted her."

It was in a time when the mock heroic was the favorite tone of our public speaking. Lincoln, like the rest in that period, had nothing to talk about, and he split the ear with wordy declamation. In a day of ordinary things he could be as ordinary as any one. Only when his heart was touched by a lofty cause was he lifted above the commonplace.

When the roaring log-cabin and hard-cider campaign of 1840 spread over the country, a period of all shouting and no thinking, he was in the thick of the idle fray. The bitter personal controversies of that year, in which he was involved, sufficed him for the rest of his days. It was a part of his education. Thenceforth, aside from an absurd duel