FOR

OR many years the edito I studied the literature rel Lincoln, and his interest has tion of a book which he has e both authentic and significant been to select stories which point, and to arrange them, consecutively, so that they tinuous illustrations of the Lincoln's wonderful career. V often maudlin tales which ha to Lincoln have been omitted be impossible to claim that a solutely comprehensive, yet the best and the essential I assembled here in a manner an outline biography in story

In connection with this pla Lincoln's life may be restat parents, born in Virginia, foll

movement across the Alleghanies to Kentucky, where Abraham Lincoln was born in Hardin County on February 12, 1809. Afterward the family continued westward to Indiana. His education, acquired almost entirely by himself, included hardly more than a year at a regular school. His was the working boyhood of the frontier. At nineteen he helped to take a flatboat down the Mississippi to New Orleans, and the fidelity of his service caused his employer to make him a clerk and to give him charge of a store at New Salem, Illinois. In 1832 the force of Lincoln's personality led to his election as captain of a company raised for the Black Hawk War. Next came his appointment as postmaster at New Salem, his study of law, and his admission, in 1836, to the practice of law, which he began at Springfield, Illinois. Law almost inevitably involved politics, and Lincoln's growing success as a lawyer was accompanied by recognition as a locally conspicuous figure in the Whig party. There followed, naturally, various elections to the Legislature, and finally, in 1847, his election to Congress, where he emphasized his antagonism to slavery. His selection as a candidate for the Senate of the United States, in 1858, led to the historic debates with Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln obtained the popular vote,