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THE "LINCOLN" LOG CABIN, AT GOOSE NEST PRAIRIE, COLES COUNTY.

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Long after her sensitive heart and weary hands had crumbled into dust, and had climbed to life again in forest flowers, Lincoln said to Herndon, with tears in his eyes: "All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother." -HOLLAND.

DIALOGUE IN 1819.

MRS. CRAWFORD: "What do you expect will become of you, Abe, if you don't stop such nonsense?"

ABE: "I'm going to be President of the United States."

"I didn't know then (in 1830) I had sense enough to be a lawyer." -LINCOLN.

Among the vicissitudes incident to the progress of a government, based upon general suffrage, and composed of a heterogeneous people, exponents of the extremes of social life will be found, installed in its curule chair.

While stately mansions, in the bosom of culture and refinement, furnished luxurious homes for Washington, the Adams', Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Van Buren, and Buchanan; the rude log cabin sheltered Jackson, Harrison, Taylor, Lincoln, and Johnson; and in irregular, but inevitable succession, the Republican succeeded the Federalist, to be, in turn, supplanted again by the latter: the statesman gave way to the politician, and he, in ordinary sequence, to the military chieftain; who, in time's resistless march, was supplanted again by the politician.

This exalted station has been adorned, for the most part, by professional politicians, some achieving the exaltation of

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statesmen, as Jefferson: others content to remain imbedded in the Serbonian bog of partisan servility, as Buchanan.

In four several instances, prior to 1860, military prowess captured the bastions and redoubts of the executive mansion. It probably is not sound policy, but it is inevitable: and experience attests that the via dolorosa which leads to the White House frequently lay through ensanguined fields.

Mr. Lincoln was the first civilian who attained to the national supremacy without the intervention of a substantial political record. He came directly to the chair of state from the mass and ranks of the people, as Jackson, a warrior, did. Lincoln, Jackson and Johnson were on a par as to obscurity of origin and paucity of education, the scholastic training of the former being all comprised within four months.

In order to understand the peculiarities and characteristics of Abraham Lincoln, we must know somewhat of the environments of his childhood and youth, of his early home and its social life, of his associates, education and habits. In order to fully comprehend the moral exaltation to which he attained, we must know how dense the obscurity whence he emerged.

The pioneer's home was a cabin, constructed of undressed logs, the interstices filled up with native clay; puncheon floor, if any; no doors or windows as a rule; clapboard roof held in place by ridge poles.

Heating and cooking arrangements were comprised within a huge chimney built up of rocks, embedded in native clay; or of sticks of wood, between and around which was daubed as much clay mud as would adhere, and the fire was maintained through winter and summer alike in the former season for warmth and cooking, and in the latter season for cooking purposes alone. There usually was no door: but light was admitted through the door-way, which generally was unobstructed night or day, except in rough weather, when the gap was imperfectly closed by a "shutter," which answered as a substitute for a door; and which

revolved on wooden home-made hinges, hewed out with an axe; or sometimes a strip of rag carpet or a deer's untanned hide, or a bed quilt was hung in the aperture, through which egress and ingress was had. The single room sufficed for all purposes; the cooking was performed by aid of skillets on the hearth, and the frugal meal was eaten sometimes on a stationary table, consisting of clap-boards held in place by two horizontal sticks inserted in the side of the cabin by aid of an auger, and sometimes on a movable table, equally rude.

Bedsteads, hewed out of native timber with a broad ax, occupied the end of the cabin which was not usurped by the broad fire-place: and when bed-time came, the members of the fair sex prepared for their nocturnal repose by stripping off their outer dress and removing their stockings, if they were favored with them, or by washing off the superfluous dirt from their feet if they were not addicted to the use of shoes; and the male gender made its nightly toilet in an equally primitive mode. But all parties -men, women and children-the members of the family, guests and strangers, alike, went to bed and got up, all in sight of, and in close proximity to, each other.

The writer himself stayed for nine consecutive weeks at one of these cabins, where a man and his wife and three children constituted the family; and the whole crowd, six of us, slept in a space, fourteen by eight feet in area, with not even a sheet hung up, to guarantee semi-privacy.

The ordinary stable of civilization is far, infinitely far, superior to the cabin of the backwoodsmen of Kentucky of three-fourths of a century ago.

The story which Stephen A. Douglas used to tell was but an ordinary incident. Soon after his arrival in Illinois, he chanced to stop with a Kentuckian who had settled in Cass County, and being shown his bed in one corner of the sole room the whole family turned the battery of their united. gaze on him, merely out of idle curiosity-he was then no

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