progress of the school had been excellent,
but that more of the rod had been needed.

(Where had all the green bushes gone in the clearing, but to purposes of
discipline?)

Then good Brother Jasper was asked to speak. The "wizard" who could
speak Latin arose. The pupils could see his great heart under his face.
It shone through. His fine German culture did not lead him away from the
solid merits of the forest school.

"There are purposes in life that we can not see," he began, "but the
secret comes to those who listen to the beating of the human heart, and
at the doors of heaven. Spirits whisper, as it were. The soul, a great
right intention, is here; and there is a conscience here which is power;
and here, for aught we can say, may be some young Servius Tullius of
this wide republic."

Servius Tullius? Would any one but he have dreamed that the citizens of
Rome would one day delight to honor an ungainly pupil of that forest
school?

One day there came to Washington a present to the Liberator of the
American Republic. It looked as follows, and bore the following
inscription:

[Illustration: "To Abraham Lincoln, President, for the second time, of
the American Republic, citizens of Rome present this stone, from the
wall of Servius Tullius, by which the memory of each of those brave
assertors of liberty may be associated. Anno 1865."]

It is said that the modest President shrank from receiving such a
compliment as that. It was too much. He hid away the stone in a
storeroom of the capital, in the basement of the White House. It now
constitutes a part of his monument, being one of the most impressive
relics in the Memorial Hall of that structure. It is twenty-four hundred
years old, and it traveled across the world to the prairies of Illinois,
a tribute from the first advocate of the rights of the people to the
latest defender of all that is sacred to the human soul.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE PARABLE PREACHES IN THE WILDERNESS.

The house in which young Abraham Lincoln attended church was simple and
curious, as were the old forest Baptist preachers who conducted the
services there. It was called simply the "meeting-house." It stood in
the timber, whose columns and aisles opened around it like a vast
cathedral, where the rocks were altars and the birds were choirs. It was
built of rude logs, and had hard benches, but the plain people had done
more skillful work on this forest sanctuary than on the school-house