.

Taken unawares, Abe staggered backward and ax and girl fell to the
ground together. The sharp implement cut her ankle badly, and
mischievous Matilda shrieked with fright and pain when she saw the blood
gushing from the wound. Young Lincoln tore a sleeve from his shirt to
bandage the gash and bound up the ankle as well as he could. Then he
tried to teach the still sobbing girl a lesson.

"'Tilda," he said gently, "I'm surprised. Why did you disobey mother?"

Matilda only wept silently, and the lad went on, "What are you going to
tell mother about it?"

"Tell her I did it with the ax," sobbed the young girl. "That will be
the truth, too."

"Yes," said Abe severely, "that's the truth, but not _all_ the truth.
You just tell the whole truth, 'Tilda, and trust mother for the rest."

Matilda went limping home and told her mother the whole story, and the
good woman was so sorry for her that, as the girl told Abe that evening,
"she didn't even scold me."

"BOUNDING A THOUGHT--NORTH, SOUTH, EAST AND WEST"

Abe sometimes heard things in the simple conversation of friends that
disturbed him because they seemed beyond his comprehension. He said of
this:

"I remember how, when a child, I used to get irritated when any one
talked to me in a way I couldn't understand.

"I do not think I ever got angry with anything else in my life; but that
always disturbed my temper--and has ever since.

"I can remember going to my little bedroom, after hearing the neighbors
talk of an evening with my father, and spending no small part of the
night walking up and down, trying to make out what was the exact
meaning of some of their, to me, dark sayings.

"I could not sleep, although I tried to, when I got on such a hunt for
an idea; and when I thought I had got it, I was not satisfied until I
had repeated it over and over, and had put in language plain enough, as
I thought, for any boy I knew to comprehend.

"This was a kind of a passion with me, and it has stuck by me; for I am
never easy now when I am bounding a thought, till I have bounded it
east, and bounded it west, and bounded it north, and bounded it south."

HIGH PRAISE FROM HIS STEPMOTHER

Not long before her death, Mr. Herndon, Lincoln's law partner, called
upon Mrs. Sarah Lincoln to collect material for a "Life of Lincoln" he
was preparing to write. This was the best of all the things she related
of her illustrious stepson:

"I can say what scarcely one mother in