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It was a superstitious community, and to the very day of his death Lincoln never failed to believe in supernatural portents. If a dog ran directly across the hunter's path, bad luck would follow unless the little fingers were hooked together and vigorously pulled as long as the dog remained in sight; charmed twigs pointed to springs and buried treasure; faith doctors with their mysterious ceremonies wrought cures. a bird alighted in the window, one of the family would die; a horse breathing on a child gave whooping cough; for good luck rails must be split in the early part of the day or in the light of the moon, roots, such as potatoes, planted in the dark of the moon, but plants which bore fruit above ground in the light of that orb; if a fence was not made in the light of the moon it would sink; and Friday was fatal to every enterprise.

What Lincoln thought of his surroundings at this time can never be known. To a campaign biographer he said, with his usual distaste for this subject, that his early life presented nothing but "the short and simple annals of the poor." Nothing but a temporary, conventional, or politic mood is shown by his remark to a young man introduced to him in 1847: "I do not think you would succeed at splitting rails. That was my occupation at your age, and I do not think I have taken as much pleasure in anything else

from that day to this." Nor do we know much of the political opinions left in him by his meditations and his Gentryville reading and talking. One of the earlier accounts shows him fond of singing, without musical ability but with zest, not only hymns but such political reflections as this:

"Let auld acquaintance be forgot
And never brought to mind,
May Jackson be our President,

And Adams left behind."

Those who owned slaves in the primitive community assumed superiority to those who had none; but questionings about the peculiar institutions were in the air, the contest in favor of excluding slavery having been settled only about the time the Lincolns moved to Indiana, so that its echoes must have resounded in the Gentryville grocery. In 1822, when Lincoln was thirteen, an abolition newspaper was started about one hundred miles from the village, and during his whole boyhood and youth there was plenty to lead his mind, at least occasionally, onto the topic.

The talkative youth presented a pictorial appearance, dressed in coat, trousers, and moccasins of tanned deer hide; for although the habit of wearing garments of fur and wool dyed with the juice of the butternut or white walnut began about the time he reached manhood, and the

hides of cattle began to be tanned, for a long time only the women indulged in such luxuries, and Lincoln was not the person to take the lead in elegance. Doubtless he, like his neighbors, looked upon split-log Mitchell, the man whose cabin was made of square hewn timbers, instead of round logs with the bark on, as a good deal of a snob. The most ungainly and crude in the whole collection, Lincoln alone possessed the sacred fire that drove him, not only to every book, and with the rest of the men, gun on arm, to the itinerant preacher and his cabin church; but alone to the court-house, held in a double cabin, in these days when the grand jury sat on a log in the woods and all the petit jurors wore side knives and moccasins. These habits made him a better and better talker at the village store, where his humor, knowledge, and inherited narrative gift were always welcome. His appear

ance encouraged the humorous point of view. Tall, lanky, sallow, and dark, slightly stooping, with a careless mop of hair, tanned clothes flung on, he was then what a young lawyer described later as "the ungodliest sight I ever saw." Not only humor, but loneliness and melancholy were encouraged by his lack of outer charm, a sadness perhaps bequeathed to him with the blood of the mother he scarcely knew. Naturally, he became a satirist, and used his gifts of ridicule

C

and rough verse on those by whom he was treated inconsiderately. A family named Grigsby being among the offenders, he wrote a "chronicle " about them, with consequences which showed not only his powers but his prudence. When the chronicle was found by one of the family where the author had carefully dropped it, Billy, the eldest, challenged him to fight with fists. When the combatants and their friends reached the battle-ground, a mile and a half from Gentryville, the magnanimous Lincoln remarked that as he was the superior of Billy in all enumerable respects he would make a fairer contest by delegating his step-brother John Johnson to represent the family. John was speedily on his back, and the astute Lincoln, claiming a foul, hauled Billy off, swung a whiskey bottle over his head, and, as the legend goes, declared that he was the big buck of the lick, able without difficulty to thrash Billy. Billy admitted as much, and offered to produce equality by fighting with pistols, but his opponent intelligently remarked that he did not care to fool away his life on the chances of a single shot.

The other side of his nature, the deep, sympathetic, honest side, which went with the healthy violence of taste and body, comes out in another anecdote of the same period. His younger sister Matilda, against the orders of her mother, secretly

followed early one morning when he was starting to clear a piece of wood, his axe in his hand. Softly stealing up behind him the girl sprung upon his back, threw her arms about his neck, and brought him backward to the earth. The falling axe cut her ankle. As they were doing what they could with the wound the frightened Matilda wondered how she could escape the mother's detection, but her brother advised her to confess frankly to the whole truth, -the first tale we have of the trait which afterward made him Honest Abe.

A less elevated instance of his desire to help others is connected with Crawford's school. There is conflicting evidence about his orthographical abilities, but they seem to have surpassed those of his neighbors, so that he led in the spelling class. At any rate he could spell "defied," and his schoolmate Kate Roby, who could not, tells a story of the consequences. The word "defied" had been given out by Schoolmaster Crawford, but had been misspelled several times when it came Miss Roby's turn. "Abe stood on the opposite side of the room," said she in 1865, "and was watching me. I began d-e-f-, and then I stopped, hesitating whether to proceed with an i or a y. Looking up, I beheld Abe, a grin covering his face, and pointing with his index finger to his eye. I took the hint, spelled the word with an i, and it went through all right."