night they broke in his doors and windows,
and overturned his counters and sugar barrels. It was too much
for Radford, and he sold out next day to William G. Green for a
four-hundred-dollar note signed by Green. At the latter's request,
Lincoln made an inventory of the stock, and offered him six hundred
and fifty dollars for it--a proposition which was cheerfully
accepted. Berry and Lincoln, being unable to pay cash, assumed the
four-hundred-dollar note payable to Radford, and gave Green their
joint note for two hundred and fifty dollars. The little grocery owned
by James Rutledge was the next to succumb. Berry and Lincoln bought
it at a bargain, their joint note taking the place of cash. The three
stocks were consolidated. Their aggregate cost must have been not less
than fifteen hundred dollars. Berry and Lincoln had secured a monopoly
of the grocery business in New Salem. Within a few weeks two penniless
men had become the proprietors of three stores, and had stopped
buying only because there were no more to purchase.

[Illustration: THE EARLIEST PORTRAIT OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN
(REPRINTED FROM McCLURE'S FOR NOVEMBER).

From a daguerreotype in the possession of the Hon. Robert T. Lincoln,
taken before Lincoln was forty, and first published in the McCLURE'S
Life of Lincoln. Of the sixty or more portraits of Lincoln which will
be published in this series of articles, thirty, at least, will
be absolutely new to our readers; and of these thirty none is more
important than this early portrait. It is generally believed that
Lincoln was not over thirty-five years old when this daguerreotype was
taken, and it is certainly true that it is the face of Lincoln as a
young man. "About thirty would be the general verdict," says Mr. Murat
Halstead in an editorial in the Brooklyn "Standard-Union," "if it were
not that the daguerreotype was unknown when Lincoln was of that
age. It does not seem, however, that he could have been more than
thirty-five, and for that age the youthfulness of the portrait is
wonderful. This is a new Lincoln, and far more attractive, in a sense,
than anything the public has possessed. This is the portrait of a
remarkably handsome man.... The head is magnificent, the eyes deep
and generous, the mouth sensitive, the whole expression something
delicate, tender, pathetic, poetic. This was the young man with whom
the phantoms of romance dallied, the young man who recited poems and
was fanciful and speculative, and