s a
poor return, at best, for all the good woman's devotion to me, and there
is not going to be any half-way business about it."

The dutiful stepson did as he planned. Some years later he was obliged
to write to John Johnston, his stepmother's son, appealing to him not to
try to induce his mother to sell the land lest the old woman should lose
the support he had provided for her in her declining years.

IN LOVE WITH A BELLE FROM LEXINGTON

Lincoln's popularity in Sangamon County, always increasing, was greatly
strengthened by the part he had taken in the removal of the capital to
Springfield, which was the county seat as well as the State capital. So
he was returned to the Legislature, now held in Springfield, time after
time, without further effort on his part. He was looked upon as a young
man with a great future. While he was in the office with Major Stuart
that gentleman's cousin, Miss Mary Todd, a witty, accomplished young
lady from Lexington, Kentucky, came to Springfield to visit her sister,
wife of Ninian W. Edwards, one of the "Long Nine" in the State Assembly.

Miss Todd was brilliant and gay, a society girl--in every way the
opposite of Mr. Lincoln--and he was charmed with everything she said and
did. Judge Douglas was one of her numerous admirers, and it is said that
the Louisville belle was so flattered by his attentions that she was in
doubt, for a time, which suitor to accept. She was an ambitious young
woman, having boasted from girlhood that she would one day be mistress
of the White House.

To all appearances Douglas was the more likely to fulfill Miss Todd's
high ambition. He was a society man, witty in conversation, popular with
women as well as with men, and had been to Congress, so he had a
national reputation, while Lincoln's was only local, or at most confined
to Sangamon County and the Eighth Judicial Circuit of Illinois.

But Mr. Douglas was already addicted to drink, and Miss Todd saw
doubtless that he could not go on long at the rapid pace he was keeping
up. It is often said that she was in favor of slavery, as some of her
relatives who owned slaves, years later, entered the Confederate ranks
to fight against the Union. But the remarkable fact that she finally
chose Lincoln shows that her sympathies were against slavery, and she
thus cut herself off from several members of her own family. With a
woman's intuition she saw the true worth of Abraham Lincoln, and before
long they were un