ew ground in
Illinois. Abraham drove the team of oxen which carried their household
goods from the old home to their new abiding place near Decatur, in
Macon County, Illinois. Driving over the muddy, ill-made roads with a
heavily laden team was hard and slow work, and the journey occupied a
fortnight. When they arrived at their destination, Lincoln again helped
to build a log cabin for the family home. With his stepbrother he also,
as he said himself, "made sufficient of rails to fence ten acres of
ground, and raised a crop of sown corn upon it the same year."

In that same year, 1830, he reached his majority. It was time for him
to be about his own business. He had worked patiently and cheerfully
since he was able to hold an ax in his hands for his own and the
family's maintenance. They could now get along without him, and he felt
that the time had come for him to develop himself for larger duties.

He left the log cabin, penniless, without even a good suit of clothes.
The first work he did when he became his own master was to supply this
latter deficiency. For a certain Mrs. Millet he "split four hundred
rails for every yard of brown jeans, dyed with white walnut bark,
necessary to make a pair of trousers."

For nearly a year he continued to work as a rail splitter and farm
"hand." Then he was hired by a Mr. Denton Offut to take a flatboat
loaded with goods from Sangamon town to New Orleans. So well pleased
was Mr. Offut with the way in which Lincoln executed his commission
that on his return he engaged him to take charge of a mill and store at
New Salem.

There, as in every other place in which he had resided, he became the
popular favorite. His kindness of heart, his good humor, his skill as a
story teller, his strength, his courtesy, manliness, and honesty were
such as to win all hearts. He would allow no man to use profane
language before women. A boorish fellow who insisted on doing so in the
store on one occasion, in spite of Lincoln's protests, found this out
to his cost. Lincoln had politely requested him not to use such
language before ladies, but the man persisted in doing so. When the
women left the store, he became violently angry and began to abuse
Lincoln. He wanted to pick a quarrel with him. Seeing this Lincoln
said, "Well, if you must be whipped, I suppose I may as well whip you
as any other man," and taking the man out of the store he gave him a
well-merited chastisement. Strange to say, he becam