protruding, looking
for some way out of the world that would deny him his right to the
sunshine and the streams. The young orator saw it all; his lip curled
bitterly, and his words burned. He awakened such a sympathy for the
reptile, and such a feeling of resentment against the hand which had
ruined this little life, that the offender shrank away from the scene,
calling out defiantly:

"Come away, and let him talk. He's only chicken-hearted."

The scholars knew that there was no cowardice in the heart of Lincoln.
They felt the force of the scene. The boys and girls of Andrew
Crawford's school never forgot the pleas that Abraham used to make for
the animals and reptiles of the woods and streams.

Nearly every youth exhibits his leading trait or characteristic in his
school-days.

"The tenor of our whole lives," said an English poet, "is what we make
it in the first five years after we become our masters"; and a wiser
than he has said, "The thing that has been is, and God requireth the
past." Columbus on the quays of Genoa; Zinzendorf forming among his
little companions the order of the "Grain of Mustard-Seed"; the poets
who "lisped in numbers"; the boy statesmanship of Cromwell; and the
early aspiration of nearly every great leader of mankind--all showed the
current of the life-stream, and it is the current alone that knows and
prophesies the future. When Abraham Lincoln fell, the world uncovered
its head. Thrones were sorrowful, and humanity wept. Yet his earliest
rostrum was a stump, and his cause the natural rights of the voiceless
inhabitants of the woods and streams. The heart that throbbed for
humanity, and that won the heart of the world, found its first utterance
in defense of the principles of the birds'-nest commandment. It was a
beginning of self-education worthy of the thought of a Pestalozzi. It
was a prophecy.

As the young advocate of the rights and feelings of the dumb creation
was ending his fiery discourse, the buttonless Tunker, himself a
disciple of Pestalozzi, came into the school-grounds and read the
meaning of the scene. Jasper saw the soul of things, and turned always
from the outward expressions of life to the inward motive. He read the
true character of the boy in buckskin breeches, human heart, and fluent
tongue. He sat down on the log step of the school-house in silence, and
Mr. Crawford presently came out with a quill pen behind his ear, and sat
down beside him.

"That boy has been t