towards the gifted orator. Mr. Breckinridge was walking grandly out of the court-room, when there stood in his path a gigantic, solemn-visaged, beardless clodhopper, reaching out a long coatless arm, with an immense hard hand at the end of it, while an agitated voice expressed the heartiest commendation of the ability and eloquence of his plea for his client.

Breckinridge was a small-souled man in spite of his mental power and his training, for he did but glance in proud amazement at the shabby, presumptuous boy, and then pass stupidly on without speaking. He had imparted priceless instruction to a fellow who had yet but a faint perception of the artificial barriers before him.

The two met again, at the city of Washington, in the year 1862, under other circumstances, and then the President of the United States again complimented Mr. Breckinridge upon the excellence of his speech in the Indiana murder-case.

The precise information conveyed to Abe, whether or not he mentally put it into form, was that he was a "poor white" and of no account; a species of human trash to whom the respect due to all recognized manhood did not belong. He forgave the man who told him what he was, but he never ceased to profit by the stinging, wholesome information.

It was but a little while afterwards, while he was temporarily employed by old Josiah Crawford, and when he had worried good Mrs. Crawford overmuch by the fun and uproar he created in her kitchen, that she asked him,

"Now, Abe, what on earth do you s'pose'll ever become of ye? What'll you be good for if you keep a-goin' on in this way?"

"Well," slowly responded Abe, "I reckon I'm goin' to be President of the United States one of these days."

He said it soberly enough. And that was not the only occasion upon which there fell from his lips some strange, extravagant expression of his inner thought that there was a great work for him to do somewhere in the future. He could plow, chop

wood, 'tend store, do errands, make fun, now; but he could all the while feel that he was growing, growing, and that this would not last forever. He could feel that the change continually going forward within him could not be with reference to such a life as he was leading, or to such as he saw led by the full-grown and elderly men around him. For him there was, there must be, something more and higher, and he was blindly reaching out after it, day by day; but all the others deemed him as one of themselves; better than some, it might be, but very much below any young man whose father could give him. a good farm and some hogs and a little ready money.

CHAPTER IX.

THE FLATBOAT.

A Trading Voyage-Life in the Southern States-First View of Human Slavery-1828.

ABE LINCOLN had made himself the best known and most popular young fellow in all the region round about Gentryville; but although the whole country liked him, he did not at all like the country. He was now nineteen years of age, but was still subject to his father's authority, and Tom Lincoln was not the man to surrender his legal right to the wages of his stalwart son. All rates for farm-labor were low, however, and there was none too much of it to be sold, at any price, in a community where most men could do all their own work and have ample time left for lounging at neighboring cabins or around the village grocery.

Abe had long since given up the idea of earning a living behind the counter of Jones's store, or any other that he knew of. He was under bonds to his father, but he made an attempt to obtain employment as a boat-hand on the river. His age was against him in his first effort, but his opportunity was coming to him. In the month of March, 1828, he hired himself to Mr. Gentry, the great man of Gentryville. His duties were to be mainly performed at Gentry's Landing, near Rockport, on the Ohio River. There was a great enterprise on foot, or rather in the water, at Gentry's Landing, for a flatboat belonging to the proprietor was loading with bacon and other produce for a trading trip down the Mississippi to New Orleans. She was to be under the command of young Allen Gentry, but would never return to the Ohio, for flatboats are built to go down with the stream and not for pulling against it.

Abe's hour for travel and adventure had at last arrived. He was given the position of "bow-hand," at eight dollars a month and rations, with a paid return-passage home on a steamboat. It was a golden vision indeed, yet not so much for the money as for the grand trip itself.

There was society at the "Landing;" and while the boat was taking on her cargo, her tall bow-hand improved his opportunities.

Miss Roby, whom he had known at Crawford's school, and through whom he had saved the spelling-class from disaster, was deeply interested in the success of that flatboat. Not a great while after the completion of its one voyage she became Mrs. Allen Gentry, and even now she found excuses and occasions for coming on board to chat with the captain and with his queer, fun-loving "crew."

"Abe," she said, late one afternoon, "the sun's going down." "Reckon not," said Abe. "We're coming up, that's all." "Don't you s'pose I've got eyes?"

"Reckon so; but it's the earth that goes round. The sun keeps as still as a tree. When we're swung around so we can't see him any more, all the shine's cut off and we call it night." "Abe, what a fool you are!"

It was all in vain to explain the matter any further. The science of astronomy had not been taught at Crawford's, and was not at all popular in Indiana. Whatever sprinkling of it Abe had found among his books, there was no use in trying to spread its wild vagaries along the banks of the Ohio River. He knew altogether too much for his time, and a mere flatboatman had no business to dispute the visible truth concerning the daily habits of a contrivance so well known as the sun.

The flatboat was cast loose from her moorings in April, and swept away down the river, with Abraham Lincoln as manager of the forward oars. No such craft ever had a longer or stronger pair of arms pledged to keep her blunt nose well directed.

They drifted down the Ohio into the Mississippi, and on down for hundreds of crooked miles, borne swiftly by the muddy, irresistible current. It was a matter both of skill and toil to effect a stoppage at a landing for trading purposes; but the required visits were made from place to place, and the young merchants met with very encouraging success. The worst enemy they had to contend with was counterfeit money, for they were no experts in detecting the quality of either coin or paper. In fact, there was so much more bad money than good in circulation up and down the Mississippi that a withdrawal of all the spurious stuff at any one time would have caused a disastrous contraction of the currency. The all but universal custom was to take what came and to pass it again without inquiry, unless it were too hopelessly defective in its external appearance.

It was a trip full of life-long consequences to Abraham Lincoln. Now again, for the first time since, a mere child, he had emigrated from Kentucky, the budding statesman came in contact with human slavery. He had seen much of what could be done with white men in their degradation by poverty, ignorance, and intemperance. He was now to observe the effect of all these upon black human beings held as property and not regarded as men and women. He was in a fair state of preparation for such a study. Already, with patient care, he had written an essay on Temperance, the publication of which in a country newspaper at a distance had stirred his young ambition to fever heat. He had followed that with another, the leading idea of which was the necessity of general popular education; and this too had been printed. In these he had worked out and presented the results of his studies of human life among his neighbors. He was now to begin his training and preparation for yet other essays which he was to print, and for speeches which he was to deliver, in the great and terrible years that were to come.

He was not to see the sunny side of plantation-life, such as