From the collection of H W. Fay, Esq., De Kalb, Ill.

A YOKE WHICH IS TREASURED AS AN EXAMPLE OF LINCOLN'S

CRAFTSMANSHIP

GLOBE TAVERN, SPRINGFIELD, WHERE LINCOLN LIVED AFTER HIS MARRIAGE From an old print. The building is no longer standing

His neighbors respected him for his strength of character as well as for his strength of body. If a wagon stalled in the crooked, muddy lane, which was the only street of New Salem, he was among the first to go to the aid of the driver. If a widow were in need of firewood, he cut it for her. He watched with the sick, and any chance for kindness, from splitting a log to rocking a cradle, found his hand always ready to serve. If he made a mistake in weight or change across his counter, he did not sleep until he had corrected the error, though sometimes he tramped miles into the country in order to find the customer whom he had innocently wronged. All relied on his sincerity, and thus, while hardly more than a boy, he came to be hailed as "Honest Abe."

He was not, however, a successful business man. He would rather lie on the counter, his head resting on a pile of calico, and study a grammar, which he had walked six miles to borrow, than cultivate trade. Sometimes intending purchasers found him not in the store at all, and had to call him from the wayside, where he was sprawling on the grass, covering a wrapping-paper with problems in mathematics. While a sale was pending or in a lull in social conversation, he was likely to pull out a book and lose himself in the pages of Tom Paine, Voltaire,

Rollin, or Gibbon, rare copies of whose works he had come upon in that rude hamlet on the remote frontier.

In less than a year the merchant had failed and his clerk was adrift again, free to ramble about the village, the life of its groups of loiterers, or to sit all day beside the eccentric old fisherman on the banks of the Sangamon and listen to his quotations from the poetry of Shakespeare and Burns; or else, silently to walk the street, absorbed in a book, speaking to no one and seeing no one. He earned enough by an occasional job to keep him, for he never let himself become dependent on others.

There was a moral dignity about him which the villagers felt and respected. They did not rate him a loafer, but they did feel he was wasting his hours. Those bustling planners and builders of New Salem could not know that this dreamer among them was planning and building for all time, while the village they were rearing would in a few years be but a cow pasture and remembered among men only because fate had selected it as a station in the progress of Abraham Lincoln: —

"For the dreamer lives forever,

And the toiler dies in a day."

WRESTLING WITH DESTINY

Lincoln already marked out for leadership. - Chosen a captain in the Black Hawk War, an honor which pleased him more than any other. Saving the life of the only Indian he saw in the campaign against the red men in the spring of 1832. -Searching for his place in life. - Entering politics. - Defeated for the Legislature in August, 1832. High finance in New Salem. Lincoln's failure as a trust magnate. A heavy burden of debt. His first sight of Blackstone. - Doing chores about the village. A barefoot law student.-Appointed postmaster May 7, 1833, he carried his office in his hat. Surveyor. Crushed by a creditor, saved by a friend. His gratitude.

HOMELESS and unemployed, Lincoln was glad to respond to the Governor's call for volunteers, when Black Hawk, the old Indian chief, took the war path in Illinois. The scene of the conflict was far removed from the Sangamon, but the chance for a campaign aroused the spirit of adventure in the young pioneers about New Salem.

When the company from that neighborhood met, many of the soldiers wished Lincoln to be their captain. At the election, he and the one other candidate for the post took up positions apart, and their followers rallied around them. By far the larger number went over to Lincoln's side, and thus