of oxen, and
after a fourteen days' tramp through the wilderness, pitched his camp
once more, in Illinois. Here Abraham, having come of age and being now
his own master, rendered the last service of his minority by ploughing
the fifteen-acre lot and splitting from the tall walnut trees of the
primeval forest enough rails to surround the little clearing with a
fence. Such was the meagre outfit of this coming leader of men, at the
age when the future British Prime Minister or statesman emerges from the
university as a double first or senior wrangler, with every advantage
that high training and broad culture and association with the wisest and
the best of men and women can give, and enters upon some form of public
service on the road to usefulness and honor, the University course being
only the first stage of the public training. So Lincoln, at twenty-one,
had just begun his preparation for the public life to which he soon
began to aspire. For some years yet he must continue to earn his daily
bread by the sweat of his brow, having absolutely no means, no home,
no friend to consult. More farm work as a hired hand, a clerkship in a
village store, the running of a mill, another trip to New Orleans on a
flatboat of his own contriving, a pilot's berth on the river--these were
the means by which he subsisted until, in the summer of 1832, when he
was twenty-three years of age, an event occurred which gave him public
recognition.

The Black Hawk war broke out, and, the Governor of Illinois calling for
volunteers to repel the band of savages whose leader bore that name,
Lincoln enlisted and was elected captain by his comrades, among whom he
had already established his supremacy by signal feats of strength and
more than one successful single combat. During the brief hostilities
he was engaged in no battle and won no military glory, but his local
leadership was established. The same year he offered himself as a
candidate for the Legislature of Illinois, but failed at the polls. Yet
his vast popularity with those who knew him was manifest. The district
consisted of several counties, but the unanimous vote of the people
of his own county was for Lincoln. Another unsuccessful attempt at
store-keeping was followed by better luck at surveying, until his horse
and instruments were levied upon under execution for the debts of his
business adventure.

I have been thus detailed in sketching his early years because upon
these strange foundat