ne over into new forms brilliantly beyond
their powers of conception. That these tales were gross, even ribald,
might have been taken for granted, even had we not positive evidence
of the fact. Otherwise none of that uproarious laughter which we may be
sure sounded often across shimmering harvest fields while stalwart young
pagans, ever ready to pause, leaned, bellowing, on the handles of their
scythes, Abe Lincoln having just then finished a story.

Though the humor of these stories was Falstaffian, to say the least,
though Lincoln was cock of the walk among the plowboys of Pigeon Creek,
a significant fact with regard to him here comes into view. Not an
anecdote survives that in any way suggests personal licentiousness.
Scrupulous men who in after-time were offended by his coarseness of
speech--for more or less of the artist of Pigeon Creek stuck to him
almost to the end; he talked in fables, often in gross fables--these
men, despite their annoyance, felt no impulse to attribute to him
personal habits in harmony with his tales. On the other hand, they
were puzzled by their own impression, never wavering, that he was
"pureminded." The clue which they did not have lay in the nature of his
double life. That part of him which, in our modern jargon, we call his
"reactions" obeyed a curious law. They dwelt in his outer life without
penetrating to the inner; but all his impulses of personal action were
securely seated deep within. Even at nineteen, for any one attuned to
spiritual meaning, he would have struck the note of mystery, faintly,
perhaps, but certainly. To be sure, no hint of this reached the minds
of his rollicking comrades of the harvest field. It was not for such as
they to perceive the problem of his character, to suspect that he was a
genius, or to guess that a time would come when sincere men would form
impressions of him as dissimilar as black and white. And so far as it
went the observation of the plowboys was correct. The man they saw was
indeed a reflection of themselves. But it was a reflection only. Their
influence entered into the real man no more than the image in a mirror
has entered into the glass.

III. A VILLAGE LEADER

Though placid, this early Lincoln was not resigned. He differed from the
boors of Pigeon Creek in wanting some other sort of life. What it was he
wanted, he did not know. His reading had not as yet given him definite
ambitions. It may well be that New Orleans was the clue to