out to a good-for-nothing fellow named Berry; the other Herndon quarreled with Berry and sold to Lincoln on credit. The Clary Grove boys had a grudge against Radford and took a trip to town, broke his windows and frightened him so badly that he sold out to one Green for four hundred dollars. The next day Lincoln and his partner bought Green's "bargain" for six hundred and fifty dollars on credit, and soon after Rutledge sold out to them, receiving their notes in payment.

Thus, in the course of a few days, Lincoln became half owner in three stocks of goods, owing every cent of purchase money, and hampered by a scamp of a partner. When goods were sold over the counter, everybody insisted upon buying at retail upon the same terms of payment, and, as might easily have been foreseen, the concern soon collapsed, leaving Lincoln with the memory of a levanted partner and the incubus of a load of debt.

In this time of need, the surveyor of Sangamon county, Mr. Calhoun, needed an assistant. Real estate speculations were rife, and he required a man of approved honesty. He knew Lincoln to be honest and consulted him as to his ability. He brought a book on surveying and told the young man that, if he would fit himself, he should have all the work he could do. This was enough. Lincoln took his text-book, retired to the house of Mr. Graham, his schoolmaster friend, who lived in the country, and in six weeks reported for duty as a surveyor. He at once took the field, his work proved honest and accurate, and he was regularly installed as assistant county surveyor. He had, indeed, all the work he could do, and was more easy as to his immediate needs than ever before. But behind him was that grim phantom of debt.

All of the paper given by Lincoln, in connection with his unfortunate business experiment, save one note, was in the hands of friends, who had entire confidence in his honesty, and, with them, he had no difficulty in making arrangements for its gradual payment. One note, for the sum of four hundred dollars, had passed into the ownership of a stranger, and, as Lincoln was entirely unable to meet it when due, suit was brought, a judgment taken and execution issued. His books were safe, under the exemption law, but his horse, saddle and bridle, and his surveying instruments-the tools of his temporary trade, were levied upon and advertised for sale. Among the friends whom Lincoln had made was a farmer named Short. He went, unasked, to the sheriff, and gave a bond for the production of the property on the day of sale, so that Lincoln had the use of them in the meantime. When the day came, Short and another man named Greene attended the sale, and bidding in the property for $225, restored it to its former owner. Such kindness, so entirely voluntary, is a good indication of Lincoln's place in the community.

Shortly before this the young man had been made postmaster of New

Salem. The postoffice had no local habitation, and tradition has it that Lincoln carried, not only the responsibilities of office, but the office itself, upon his shoulders, carrying the village mail in his hat and delivering it wherever he and the proper persons met. He certainly had no time to waste, for he was very busy as surveyor, had his duties as postmaster to do, and was hard at work with his law books in every interval of other occupations. More than once he walked the twenty miles to Springfield, to buy or borrow a law book, and read his new treasure every step of his homeward journey.

Now comes one of the saddest periods in Lincoln's life; one that very nearly wrecked him at the time, and left a wound that never healed. Anne, the third daughter of James Rutledge, was a girl of great natural endowment, high principle, good education and rare beauty. Two years after Lincoln arrived at New Salem, he had boarded with her father, and she was then engaged to be married to young McNeil, a prosperous merchant. This man revealed to her that his name was not McNeil but McNamar, and that he had come west under a false name, that he might make a fortune and return to care for his father in his old age. She could not condemn the motive, whatever she thought of the device, and when he closed up his business and went to New York, with a promise to return and claim her, she received his words with perfect faith. He soon wrote of his father's death, and then his letters became more and more rare, and finally ceased.

It was a dastardly act, and it hurt the poor girl cruelly, but she had a quixotic sense of honor, and when, in due time, Lincoln became her suitor, she refused to regard herself as free from her promise, though her former lover had so basely broken his. She was far from indifferent to Lincoln even at first, and at length came to love him devotedly, but she foolishly thought a definite release necessary to set her at liberty. As for Lincoln, he loved the girl with all the intensity of a very sensitive and affectionate nature. His ambition as a student and a politician received a new and little needed spur. He felt the desire that every real man has to distinguish himself in the eyes of the woman he loves.

Its

There had been some important political changes between 1832 and 1834. The Whig party was evolving itself from the chaos of the opposition. general principles were such as Lincoln approved, and, while he was not committed as a partisan, he inclined toward the Whigs. He declared himself a candidate for election to the legislature and made a thorough canvass of the county, speaking as he had never spoken before. The result was his election by a very large plurality.

The capital was then at Vandalia, and the question of ways and means became an important one. The clothing he wore would do well enough for New Salem, but his dignity as a representative of the people demanded

something better now. Then, too, there were expenses of travel and living to be met, pending the receipt of his pay. His solution of the difficulty is thus related: Going to a friend named Smart, a man with as much humor as he, and far more money, he asked:

"Smart, did you vote for me?"

"I did that very thing."

"Well, that makes you responsible; you must lend me the money t buy suitable clothing, for I want to make a decent appearance in the legis lature."

"How much do you want?"

"About two hundred dollars, I reckon."

The money thus most originally asked was promptly supplied, and with a portion of it he purchased what was probably the first really presentable suit of clothing he had ever owned. Several months elapsed between the election and the assembling of the legislature. This time was full to overflowing with reading, study and preparation of all kinds for the duty of the future. Then, too, there was Anne Rutledge, for whom, as much as for himself, he was doing all this; she was not to be neglected and, truth to tell, she received every moment that could be snatched from other employ

ment.

Though out of the chronological order, this seems to be the proper place to tell of Mr. Lincoln's great sorrow. It was not until early in 1835 that his determined wooing won such a concession from Miss Rutledge that their engagement was announced. Even then she delayed the marriage, hoping that McNamar would return, not to keep his faith, but to release her. In spite of this delay the summer was a golden one to Lincoln. He had at last taken his first great step upward. He had returned from the capital with a reputation well established, that promised to grow. He had a political future before him. He was no longer a "poor white," but a man among men. He was nearing, too, the gates of his chosen profession. To crown all, the desire of his heart was about to be gratified by marriage to the woman he loved. As the summer grew older, however, Anne Rutledge began to fail in health. Her friends were at first hopeful, but she grew more and more frail, and, on the twenty-fifth of August, died. The physicians called her disease brain fever, but those who knew better were certain that she fell under the long tension of nerves and mind, for which a cowardly human being was answerable.

Shortly before her death she sent for her lover, and he passed a long time alone with her. No one knows what was said at that farewell meeting, but the strong man came out from it with an awful agony upon his face, from which all turned in reverent pity. After she died he was fran tic, and his friends said he was insane. They might have been much farther from the truth, for he seemed to have lost all self-control and all care

for himself or those about him. Once he said: “I can never be reconciled to have the snow, rains and storms beat upon her grave." At last one of his friends, the same Mr. Greene who had aided in rescuing his surveyor's instruments, recognizing that there was not only danger that Lincoln would be utterly wrecked, bodily and physically, but also that he might do himself bodily harm, insisted upon taking him to his own farm in the country, and there kept him under careful watch for several weeks. Gradually the strong character of the man began to assert itself against his grief. He recovered his power to work—the best medicine of a mind diseased. Engrossed in his law books and in his literary and political studies, he gradually recovered his self-control, and even the appearance of cheerfulness. Those who knew him most intimately could judge in all his later years that the pain and suffering of this were always upon him.

In this yielding to the pressure of sorrow and disappointment, there was much to pity and little to condemn. Lincoln, with all his marvelous advancement, in the face of all difficulties, had had few lessons in self-control. This very episode of his life, sad and bitter as it was, had infinite value as a matter of discipline. It laid the foundation for the capacity for silent. endurance, which in later years carried him through bitter years of abuse, misinterpretation and the carrying, Atlas-like, of an awful load of responsibility. The yielding, too, such as it was, was only the sympathy of a sensitive mind with a very tender and loving heart.

Lincoln had not, in those days, settled into any such religious belief as gave him consolation and fortitude in his loss. There was very little to attract a man of thought in the emotional appeals of the frontier preachers whom he had heard. There was far more intellectual pleasure to be had from the polished and clever sophistries of a Volney or a Paine, and at one time, early in the thirties, Lincoln had made a written abstract of the views of these men. Upon this fact and Mr. Lincoln's failure to attach himself openly to any denomination, his political enemies later based their venal campaign cry of "atheist" and "freethinker" against him. No man worth the saving was ever saved without facing and sifting the claims. of such thinkers as Paine. No man who comes into the church because it is a respectable and profitable thing to do, or simply because his father was a member, has, in the end, a Christianity half so vital and efficient as does a man like Lincoln, who fights his way to reverent belief through clouds of doubt, through bad example and the repellent influence of such. observances as the frontier churches gave.

Can any man, however ignorant of his inner life, read Lincoln's speeches, proclamations and state papers, note his constant expressions of reliance upon a just God and his repeated requests that the Nation should pray for his guidance and the succor of the country, can any man read all this and still doubt that Lincoln was a Christian, a believer in the

justice of God and in the efficacy of prayer? If he was not, then surely was he the greatest hypocrite and the most successful dissembler in history. The man who fell, pierced by the bullet of a vain coward, with all his good work well done and an efficient faith again and again declared, 'needed no formal profession to mark him as a Christian.

When Lincoln went to Vandalia in 1836, his mind was far from settled. and regulated. His terrible loss was too recent, and the wound created was still raw. He was in the precise condition of mind when a sympathetic woman was absolutely necessary to him. Had he had a wise and loving mother or sister at his side, he would not have gone beyond his own family circle for the aid he needed. As it was, he contracted an engagement. Many a man has made an imprudent marriage under such circumstances.

Mary Owens was a bright, well-educated, intelligent girl. She knew of the tragedy in Lincoln's life, and the correspondence which grew up between them and resulted in a marriage engagement grew out of her appreciation of his abilities and his own grief, pain and heart hunger. The gardener grafts, not upon a whole, but a wounded tree, and this entanglement is evidence of the depth of Lincoln's hurt, not of a shallow or fickle mind. The time soon came when both the parties to this rash contract deemed it best that it be allowed to lapse, and simple friendship succeeded a relation in which there had never been any real love, and even the profession of much beyond esteem and respect was lacking.

This hasty compact might have been lost from the story of Lincoln's life but that the letters on both sides were preserved and finally published. Whatever may be said of the abstract justice or wisdom of such a publication, it has done no discredit to either of those engaged. The letters, from first to last are full of friendship and respect, and show nothing more. The generous sympathy which brought the two together was controlled by good sense, that led them to abandon their graver relation when they found that it had no sufficient basis, that they had mistaken simple esteem for a higher and more permanent feeling.

One more incident of the legislature of 1836-7 it would be a mistake to pass without mention. The aggressive fight of the slave power had already begun, and the subserviency of the north was as pronounced, if less contemptible, than in the later days. On the fourth of March the legislature adjourned. On the third, the following declaration was introduced and spread upon the journal :

"Resolution upon the subject of domestic slavery having passed both branches of the general assembly at the present session, the undersigned hereby protest against the passage of the same.

"They believe that the institution of slavery is founded upon both injustice and bad policy, but that the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than to abate its evils.