In another of these books may be seen this interesting remark about Jacob Johnson: "He was a poor man, but a man of probity and honor."

Among such ambiguous and two-edged commendations the North and the South met on common grounds in ante-war times, before Mason and Dixon's line was rubbed from the face of the common country, now fast losing its old political and social compass-points. To whatever extent the South monopolized the question of blood or pedigree, the North never fell behind in the aristocracy of wealth. Nor was ignorance ever a barrier to this aristocracy in the North. A good coat and a full pocket have been more than a match for everything else. However, few men who have had brain or character enough to write any kind of book, especially in the North, have ventured to assert that "pecuniary circumstances" alone could shut a man from all intercourse with his kind "save in business."

This whole subject of distinctions and difficulties between the rich and the poor is utterly unworthy of a moment's consideration, were it not for the startling aspects in which it places man as a selfish, ignorant, and erroneous animal. Men are lifted above other men, intrinsically, by what they acquire for themselves in mind and character, and genuine life from these. See if the calm judgment of the world, pagan or Christian, controverts this assertion. It is a sham elevation of man which is effected by the things constituting no part of him. Only those things which are within, and come from within him,

man. Are poor only

"probity and honor" predicable of the Or is it rare that "probity and honor" can be attributed to the poor? Are poverty and crime synonymous things? Is wealth only upright and good? Is wealth a sure passport to refinement and wisdom? Most lives will be estimated in the end by their little, not their great, deeds. In this view, is the preponderance likely to be against those denominated the poor? Shall the poor woman's mite be the lightest? Who shall judge?

"Jesus saw the rich men casting their gifts into the treasury, and he saw also a certain poor widow casting in thither two mites; and he said, Of a truth, I say unto you, that this poor widow hath cast in more than they all."

But this true potency may not always be concealed behind these little deeds. Poverty and wealth, after all, are perhaps well balanced in the world, in their false pretenses and their evils. The fortunate condition of plenty, from contented and constant work of mind and body, escapes most follies in itself, and is never the envy of the two extremes, which are said to be natural enemies, if not curses, to their possessors.

If in many of those traits regarded as moral, Jacob Johnson and his wife were estimated from the character of their only distinguished child, the case would not be favorable to them. But Jacob Johnson, dying in January, 1812, three years after the birth of Andrew, had little to do with his training.

At the time of his death there appeared, it is said, in a Raleigh newspaper, this notice :

Died, in this city on Saturday last, Jacob Johnson, who had, for many years, occupied a humble but useful station in society. He was city constable, sexton, and porter of the State Bank. In his last illness he was visited by the principal inhabitants of the city, by all of whom he was esteemed for his honesty, sobriety, industry, and humane, friendly disposition. Among all by whom he was known and esteemed, none lament him more (except, perhaps, his relatives) than the publisher of this paper, for he owes his life, on a particular occasion, to the boldness and humanity of Johnson."

These petty offices held by Jacob Johnson were at that day undoubtedly some index to his real character. And the good deed attributed to him here was one which few men have the opportunity to perform, but which is, in itself, not out of the ordinary disposition of men, risking his own life to save that of another. Thomas Henderson being accidentally thrown from a canoe, Johnson went into the river and rescued him.

Jacob Johnson left several children. Most of them followed their mother into Tennessee; and some of them finally settled in other portions of the Southwest, but none of them are now living.

President Johnson, the only member of this family of whom history can take any note, was born in a little one-story house at the Capital of North Carolina, December 29, 1808, and died on the last day of July, 1875.

If Andrew Johnson's mother cared anything about

the education of her children, and there is no evidence that she did, she could have done little for them in her circumstances. At that day, especially, schooling was out of the question to the children of the poor in the South. The consequence was that Mrs. Johnson's children went without anything of the kind. In a great city they would have been bootblacks and "gamins;" as it was they were simply "white trash." It appears that she married again, but there are no indications that this event bettered the condition of her children in any way.

At the early age of ten Andrew was put in a shop to learn the tailor's trade, then, especially, very valuable. This undesirable trade presented then, as it does now indeed, some rare opportunities for improvement, of which Andrew Johnson in time had the spirit to take advantage; illustrating in his own career that the way to distinction in this country may lie within any honorable pursuit.

Before entering upon this trade, Johnson had some way, perhaps, learned a part of the alphabet; but he never had gone to school a day, and never did at any subsequent time spend a moment as a student in a school or college. According to the custom of that day, Johnson was indentured, and for years went quietly on in his long and irksome apprenticeship. But in the meantime he had learned to read. His inclination in this direction was discovered to him in listening to the reading of "The American Speaker" by some generous loafer who often visited the tailor's shop for that purpose. In hearing this

man read, Johnson, perhaps, got his first glimpse of his own passion for speaking. In this book, which was afterwards presented to him, he learned to read. Among his fellow-laborers in a shop which appears to have been quite extensive, he was the only one who had a quality susceptible of being aroused. "The American Speaker" in the hands of this unknown reader put him on the way to the Presidency. The taste for reading and desire for self-improvement started at this time never left him; and the determination, formed doubtlessly in the shop at Raleigh, "to be something," he never abandoned.

In 1824, guilty of some boyish offense, he ran away from his employer, J. J. Selby, and remained over a year working at his trade in South Carolina. Early in 1826 he returned to Raleigh, and seeking his old employer offered to pay him for the unexpired time on his indenture, but his expectations of an amicable settlement were not realized, and in September of that year he set out with all his "worldly effects" to seek his fortune in Tennessee. Before this time he had assumed the responsibility of taking care of his mother. She accompanied him on his journey, which was made in a primitive style not yet out of fashion in that region. Imagine a wrinkled, swarthy little old woman with scant apparel and a few cooking utensils and other chattels in a rickety dog-cart drawn by her son; or at times she tripping along on foot to rest the willing horse in the tedious stretch over the mountains and among the hills! In this wretched plight it was