his venture as he did.
Messrs. Berry and Lincoln next acquired, likewise for credit, the stock
and goodwill of two other storekeepers, one of them the victim of a
raid from Clary's Grove. The senior partner then applied himself
diligently to personal consumption of the firm's liquid goods; the
junior member of the firm was devoted in part to intellectual and
humorous converse with the male customers, but a fatal shyness
prevented him from talking to the ladles. For the rest, he walked long
distances to borrow books, got through Gibbon and through Rollin's
"History of the World," began his study of Blackstone, and acquired a
settled habit of reading novels. So business languished. Early in
1833 Berry and Lincoln sold out to another adventurer. This also was a
credit transaction. The purchaser without avoidable delay failed and
disappeared. Berry then died of drink, leaving to Lincoln the sole
responsibility for the debts of the partnership. Lincoln could with no
difficulty and not much reproach have freed himself by bankruptcy. As
a matter of fact, he ultimately paid everything, but it took him about
fifteen years of striving and pinching himself.

Lincoln is one of the many public characters to whom the standing
epithet "honest" became attached; in his case the claim to this rested
originally on the only conclusive authority, that of his creditors.
But there is equally good authority, that of his biographer, William
Herndon, for many years his partner as a lawyer, that "he had no money
sense." This must be understood with the large qualification that he
meant to pay his way and, unlike the great statesmen of the eighteenth
century in England, did pay it. But, though with much experience of
poverty in his early career, he never developed even a reasonable
desire to be rich. Wealth remained in his view "a superfluity of the
things one does not want." He was always interested in mathematics,
but mainly as a discipline in thinking, and partly, perhaps, in
association with mechanical problems of which he was fond enough to
have once in his life patented an invention. The interest never led
him to take to accounts or to long-sighted financial provisions. In
later days, when he received a payment for his fees, his partner's
share would be paid then and there; and perhaps the rent would be paid,
and the balance would be spent at once in groceries and other goods
likely to be soon wanted, including at long interv