tor." By the time he was twenty-one, in fact, his mind was well stored with verse and prose. All of his comrades remembered his stories and his clearness in argument. "When he appeared in company," says Nat Grigsby, "the boys would gather and cluster around him to hear him talk. Mr. Lincoln was figurative in his speech, talks, and conversation. He argued much from analogy, and explained things hard for us to understand by stories, maxims, tales, and figures. He would almost always point his lesson or idea by some story that was plain and near us, that we might instantly see the force and bearing of what he said." This ability to explain clearly and to illustrate by simple figures of speech must be counted as the great mental acquirement of Lincoln's boyhood. It was a power which he gained by hard labor. Years later he related his experience to an acquaintance who had been surprised by the lucidity and simplicity of his speeches and who had asked where he was educated. "I never went to school more than six months in my life," he said, "but I can say this: that among my earliest recollections I remember how, when a mere child, I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand. I do not think I ever got angry at anything else in my life; but that always disturbed my temper, and has ever since. I can remember going to my little bedroom, after hearing the neighbors talk of an evening with my father, and spending no small part of the night walking up and down and trying to make out what was the exact meaning of some of their, to me, dark sayings. "I could not sleep, although I tried to, when I got on such a hunt for an idea until I had caught it; and when I thought I had got it, I was not satisfied until I had repeated it over and over; until I had put it in language plain enough, as I thought, for any boy I knew to comprehend. This was a kind of passion with me, and it has stuck by me; for I am never easy now, when I am handling a thought, till I have bounded it north and bounded it south, and bounded it east and bounded it west." Mr. Herndon in his interviewing in Indiana found that everywhere Lincoln was remembered as kind and helpful. The man or woman in trouble never failed to receive all the aid he could give him. Even a worthless drunkard of the village called him friend, as well he might, Lincoln having gathered him up one night from the roadside where he lay freezing and carried him on his back a long distance to a shelter and a fire. The thoughtless cruelty to animals so common among country children revolted the boy. He wrote essays on "cruelty to animals," harangued his playmates, protested whenever he saw any wanton abuse of a dumb creature. on his mates, coupled as it was with the physical strength and courage to enforce his doctrines. Stories of his good heart and helpful life might be multiplied but they are summed up in what his stepmother said of the boy: This gentleness made a lasting impression "Abe was a good boy, and I can say what scarcely one woman—a mother-can say in a thousand: Abe never gave me a cross word or look, and never refused, in fact or appearance, to do anything I requested him. I never gave him a cross word in all my life. His mind and minewhat little I had-seemed to run together. He was here after he was elected president. He was a dutiful son to me always. I think he loved me truly. I had a son, John, who was raised with Abe. Both were good boys; but I must say, both now being dead, that Abe was the best boy I ever saw, or expect to see." CHAPTER IV THE LINCOLNS LEAVE INDIANA-THE JOURNEY TO ILLINOIS -ABRAHAM LINCOLN STARTS OUT FOR HIMSELF IN THE spring of 1830 when Abraham Lincoln was twenty-one years old, his father, Thomas Lincoln, decided to leave Indiana. The reason Dennis Hanks gives for this removal was a disease called the "milk-sick." Abraham Lincoln's mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, and several of their relatives who had followed them from Kentucky had died of it. The cattle had been carried off by it. Neither brute nor human life seemed to be safe. As Dennis Hanks says: "This was reason enough (ain't it) for leaving?" Any one who has traveled through the portions of Spencer County in which the Lincolns settled will respect Thomas Lincoln for his energy in moving. When covered with timber, as the land was when he chose his farm, it no doubt promised well; but fourteen years of hard labor showed him that the soil was niggardly and the future of the country unpromising. To-day, sixty-five years since the Lincolns left Spencer County, the country remains as it was then, dull, commonplace, unfruitful. The towns show no signs of energy or prosperity. There are no leading streets or buildings; no man's house is better than his neighbor's, and every man's house is ordinary. For a long distance on each side of Gentryville as one passes by rail, no superior farm is to be seen, no prosperous farm or manufactory. It is a dead monotonous country, where no possibilities of quick wealth have been discovered, and which only centuries of tilling and fertilizing can make prosperous. The place chosen for their new home was the Sangamon country in central Illinois. It was at that day a country of great renown in the West, the name meaning "The land where there is plenty to eat." One of the family-John Hanks, a cousin of Abraham's mother-was already there, and the inviting reports he had sent to Indiana were no doubt what led the Lincolns to decide on Illinois as their future home. Gentryville saw young Lincoln depart with genuine regret, and his friends gave him a score of rude proofs that he would not be forgotten. After he was gone, one of these friends planted a cedar tree in his memory. It still marks the site of the Lincoln home-the first monument erected to the memory of a man to whom the world will never cease to raise monuments. The spot on the hill overlooking Buckthorne valley, where the Lincolns said good-by to their old home and to the home of Sarah Lincoln Grigsby, to the grave of the mother and wife, to all their neighbors and friends, is still pointed out. Buckthorne valley held many recollections dear to them all, but to no one of the company was the place dearer than to Abraham. It is certain that he felt the parting keenly, and that he never forgot his years in the Hoosier State. One of the most touching experiences he relates in all his published letters is his emotion at visiting his old Indiana home fourteen years after he had left it. So strongly was he moved by the scenes of his first conscious sorrows, efforts, joys, ambitions, that he put into verse the feelings they awakened. While he never attempted to conceal the poverty and hardship of these days, and would speak humorously of the "pretty pinching times" he experienced, he never regarded his life at this time as mean or pitiable. Frequently he talked to his friends in later days of his boyhood, and always with apparent pleasure. "Mr. Lincoln told this story (of his youth)," says Leonard Swett, "as the story of a happy child |