the roadside the horse of one of the settlers who was a notorious drunkard. There had been a houseraising in the vicinity, and the rider, overcome with the strong drink too common on those semi-festive occasions, had probably fallen off and been left by his steed, while passing through the woods. Young Lincoln was for hunting up the missing man. "Oh, come along home," said his companion; “what business is it of yours if he does get lost?"

"But he will freeze to death, if he is left on the trail this cold night."

He

The kind-hearted young fellow, hater though he was of the stuff that had laid low his neighbor, was too compassionate to leave its victim to freeze. found the man, took him, all unconscious as he was, on his own stalwart back, and actually carried him eighty rods to the nearest house, where, after sending word to his father that he must stay out all night, he sat by the half-frozen man and brought him back to consciousness and restored faculties. He saved the life of the sinner while he hated the sin.

Before he was seventeen years old, he attended court in Boonville, the county-seat of Warrick, where a man was on trial for murder. It was his first look into what seemed to him the great world outside the wilderness. An accident led him into the vicinity, and, hearing that one of the famous Breckinridges of Kentucky was to speak for the defence, he went on to Boonville, and, open-mouthed with wonder, heard the first great speech of his life. He could not restrain his admiration, and when the arguments were over and the case had gone to the

jury, and the eminent lawyer, flushed with conscious pride, was passing out of the courthouse, he was intercepted by a tall, overgrown youth, exceedingly awkward, horny-handed and evidently of the "poor white" class. The youth, his face shining with honest enthusiasm, held out his brown hand to the well-dressed lawyer, and told him how much he had enjoyed his wonderful speech. The aristocratic Breckinridge stared with surprise at the intrusive stranger, and haughtily brushed by the future President of the United States. This was not the boy's first lesson in social distinctions, but it was his first lesson in oratory; and he was just as grateful to Breckinridge as he would have been if the great man had been as gracious then as he was years after, when he was reminded by the President, in Washington, of an incident in Boonville which the Breckinridge had forgotten and the Lincoln could notforget.

From that time, young Lincoln practised speechmaking. He took up any topic that happened to be uppermost in the rural neighborhood-a question of roads, or trails, the school-tax, a bounty on wolves or bears offered by the Legislature, or any kindred question of the day; or he got up mock trials, arraigned imaginary culprits, and, himself, acted as prosecuting attorney, counsel for the defendant, judge, and foreman of the jury, making their appropriate addresses in due course. He threw himself into these debates with so much ardor that his father was obliged to interfere and forbid the speeches during hours for work. The old man grumbled: "When Abe begins to speak, all hands flock to hear him."

One notable thing about this young man was that when he began to study anything he was not satisfied until he got to the bottom of it. He went to the roots of things. He wrote and rewrote all that he wanted to commit to memory. He could not give up any difficult problem. He kept at it until he had mastered it; and in a community that was pretty dark in all matters of book-learning he seldom had any help outside of his book. He found time, now and again, of an evening, to lounge with the other young fellows in the country store at the crossroads, and, beardless youngster though he was, he delighted the rude backwoodsmen and settlers with his homely wit and wisdom. He was accounted as being deeply learned, too, in that benighted region. Great things were prophesied of the lad.

Never neglecting any task on the farm, never shirking any duty however unwelcome, young Lincoln studied almost incessantly. One of the companions of his boyhood, Dennis Hanks, said of him: "He was always reading, writing, ciphering, and writing poetry." In a wonderfully strange school God was training the President that should be.

There is in existence a manuscript book of Lincoln's, begun when he was seventeen years old, and containing various mathematical problems under the title of "Book of Examples in Arithmetic." One of these, dated March 1, 1826, is headed "Discount,' and is divided as follows: "A Definition of Discount," "Rules for its Computation," and "Proofs and Various Examples," all worked out in neat and correct figures. Following this is "Interest on Money."

And all this was carefully kept for ready reference by the boy who was busily studying how to be master of everything he attempted to learn. When he was President, somebody came to him with a story about a plot to accomplish some mischief in the government. Lincoln listened to what was a very superficial and ill-informed story, and then said: "There is one thing that I have learned and you have n't. It is only one word-'thorough."" Then bringing his hand down on the table with a thump to emphasize his meaning, he added, "Thorough!"

We know now where Abraham Lincoln learned to be thorough. It was when he was building his character.

It was about this time, when he was eighteen years old, that he conceived the mighty plan of building a boat and taking down the river some of the products of the home farm. He had had furtive glimpses of the busy life outside the woods of southern Indiana, and he longed for a closer look at it. The little craft was built, chiefly by his own hands, and, loaded with bacon, "garden truck," and such odds and ends as were thought available for market, was paddled down stream to the nearest trading-post. We have no record of the result of the voyage, except that it was on this momentous occasion that young Lincoln felt the greed of money waked within him. Never avaricious, never stingy, Lincoln was so trained to habits of frugality that he always, to use a common expression, "looked twice at a dollar before parting with it." Loitering on the river bank, after he had sold his little cargo, he saw what was to him then an

unusual sight, a steamer coming down the river. Two men came to the river's edge seeking a boat to take them to the approaching steamboat. In all the throng of small craft, they singled out Lincoln's. Without waiting to strike a bargain, he sculled the two passengers and their trunks out to the boat, and when he had put them on board with their luggage, what was his astonishment to find in his hand, as his fee, two silver half-dollars!

"I could scarcely believe my eyes," he said, when telling this adventure, years afterward, to Secretary Seward. "You may think it a very little thing; but it was the most important incident in my life. I could scarcely believe that I, a poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day. The world seemed wider and fairer before me. I was a more hopeful and confident being from that time."

The boy was waking to the possibilities of manhood. The two shining silver coins, honestly earned, lying in his palm, were tokens of what might come hereafter to well-directed labor.

It was one year later, when Lincoln was nineteen years old, that he made his second voyage. This was a great event in the young backwoodsman's career. Mr. Gentry, the owner of the neighborhood store, looking about him for a trustworthy man to take a flatboat, or "broad-horn," to New Orleans with a cargo of produce, could think of nobody so safe as young Lincoln. Abraham had not been much away from home, had no familiarity with business or with river navigation, and had never even seen the lower Mississippi. But the trader knew