congregation-Cowper's "There is a fountain filled with blood," is one recorded favourite among them; the songs, far other than hymns, which Dennis Hanks and his other mates would pick up or compose; and the practice in rhetoric and the art of exposition, which he unblushingly afforded himself before audiences of fellow labourers who welcomed the jest and the excuse for stopping work. The achievement of the self-taught man remains wonderful, but, if he surmounts his difficulties at all, some of his limitations may turn to sheer advantage. There is some advantage merely in being driven to make the most of few books; great advantage in having one's choice restricted by circumstances to good books; great advantage too in the consciousness of untrained faculty which leaves a man capable in mature life of deliberately undertaking mental discipline.

Along with the legends and authentic records of his self-training, signs of an ambition which showed itself early and which was from the first a clean and a high ambition, there are also other legends showing Lincoln as a naughty boy among naughty boys. The selection here made from these lacks refinement, and the reader must note that this was literally a big, naughty boy, not a man who had grown stiff in coarseness and ill-nature. First it must be recalled that Abraham bore a grudge against the Grigsbys, an honourable grudge in its origin and perhaps the only grudge he ever bore. There had arisen from this a combat, of which the details might displease the fastidious, but which was noble in so far that Abraham rescued a weaker combatant who was overmatched. But there ensued something more displeasing, a series of lampoons by Abraham, in prose and a kind of verse. These were gross and silly enough, though probably to the taste of the public which he then addressed, but it is the sequel that matters. In a work called "The First Chronicles of Reuben," it is related how Reuben and Josiah, the sons of Reuben Grigsby the elder, took to themselves wives on the same day. By local custom the bridal feast took place and the two

young couples began their married careers under the roof of the bridegrooms' father. Moreover, it was the custom that, at a certain stage in the celebrations, the brides should be escorted to their chambers by hired attendants who shortly after conducted the bridegrooms thither. On this occasion some sense of mischief afoot disturbed the heart of Mrs. Reuben Grigsby the elder, and, hastening upstairs, just after the attendants had returned, she cried out in a loud voice and to the great consternation of all concerned, “Why, Reuben, you're in bed with the wrong wife!" The historian who, to the manifest annoyance of Lincoln's other biographers, has preserved this and much other priceless information, infers that Abraham, who was not invited to the feast, had plotted this domestic catastrophe and won over the attendants to his evil purpose. This is not a certain inference, nor is it absolutely beyond doubt that the event recorded in "The First Chronicles of Reuben" ever happened at all. What is certain is that these Chronicles themselves, composed in what purports to be the style of Scripture, were circulated for the joint edification of the proud race of Grigsby and of their envious neighbours in the handwriting of Abraham Lincoln, then between seventeen and eighteen. Not without reason does an earlier manuscript of the same author condude, after several correct exercises in compound subtraction, with the distich:

Brium Lacerla Es hand and pen.
He will be good, but God knows when."

Not be too soleme about a tale which has here been sold for the vinsial fancy of its seemness and dece & szobably the worst that there is to tell we merr tere look forward and face the well-known fact that the unseem, ressage rastic boys favoured She get resident's conversation og fe. It is vel to be an iver Lactin was quite without IT SEEM LT sence Essizness, such as can be Armed Es Ife was ristere and seems

u have been she sat He had that shty

reverence for womanhood which is sometimes acquired
as easily in rough as in polished surroundings and often
quite as steadily maintained. The testimony of his early
companions, along with some fragments of the boy's
feeble but sincere attempts at verse, shows that he
acquired it young. But a large part of the stories and
pithy sayings for which he was famous wherever he went,
but of which when their setting is lost it is impossible to
recover the enjoyment, were undeniably coarse, and
naturally enough this fact was jarring to some of those
in America who most revered him. It should not really
be hard, in any comprehensive view of his character and
the circumstances in which it unfolded itself, to trace in
this bent of his humour something not discordant with
the widening sympathy and deepening tenderness of his
nature. The words of his political associate in Illinois,
Mr. Leonard Swett, afterwards Attorney-General of the
United States, may suffice. He writes: "Almost any
man, who will tell a very vulgar story, has, in a degree,
a vulgar mind. But it was not so with him; with all his
purity of character and exalted morality and sensibility,
which no man can doubt, when hunting for wit he had
no ability to discriminate between the vulgar and refined
substances from which he extracted it. It was the wit
he was after, the pure jewel, and he would pick it up
out of the mud or dirt just as readily as from a parlour
table." In any case his best remembered utterances of
this order, when least fit for print, were both wise and
incomparably witty, and in any case they did not prevent
grave gentlemen, who marvelled at them rather uncom-
fortably, from receiving the deep impression of what
they called his pure-mindedness.

One last recollection of Lincoln's boyhood has appealed, beyond any other, to some of his friends as prophetic of things to come. Mention has already been made of his two long trips down the Mississippi. With the novel responsibilities which they threw on him, and the novel sights and company which he met all the way to the strange, distant city of New Orleans, they must

have been great experiences. Only two incidents of them are recorded. In the first voyage he and his mates had been disturbed at night by a band of negro marauders and had had a sharp fight in repelling them, but in the second voyage he met with the negro in a way that to him was more memorable. He and the young fellows with him saw, among the sights of New Orleans, negroes chained, maltreated, whipped and scourged; they came in their rambles upon a slave auction where a fine mulatto girl was being pinched and prodded and trotted up and down the room like a horse to show how she moved, that "bidders might satisfy themselves," as the auc tioneer said, of the soundness of the article to be sold. John Johnston and John Hanks and Abraham Lincoln saw these sights with the unsophisticated eyes of honest country lads from a free State. In their home circle it seems that slavery was always spoken of with horror. One of them had a tenacious memory and a tenacious will. "Lincoln saw it," John Hanks said long after, and other men's recollections of Lincoln's talk confirmed him

"I incoln saw it; his heart bled; said nothing much, was silent. I can say, knowing it, that it was on this trip that he formed his opinion of slavery. It ran its iron into him then and there, May, 1831. I have heard him say so often." Perhaps in other talks old John Hanks dramatised his early remembrances a little; he related how at the slave auction Lincoln said, " By God, boys, let's get away from this. If ever I get a chance to hit that thing. I'll hit it hard.”

The youth, who probably did not express his indignation in these prophetic words, was in fact chosen to deal "that thing" a blow from which it seems unlikely to recover as a permitted institution among civilised men, and it is certain that from this early time the thought of slavery never ceased to be hateful to him. Yet it is not in the light of a crusader against this special evil that we are to regard him. When he came back from this voyage to his new home in Illinois he was simo'r a youth ambicious of an honourable part in the Lie of the

young country of which he was proud. We may regard, and he himself regarded, the liberation of the slaves, which will always be associated with his name, as a part of a larger work, the restoration of his country to its earliest and noblest tradition, which alone gave permanence or worth to its existence as a nation.