ted from my
heart the gloom that threatened to smother me, and I went home and told
the story to my mother and sisters, and they too smiled, so closely akin
are tears and smiles.

* * * * *

The story of Lincoln's life had been ingrained into me long before I ever
read a book. For the people who knew Lincoln, and the people who knew the
people that Lincoln knew, were the people I knew. I visited at their
houses and heard them tell what Lincoln had said when he sat at table
where I then sat. I listened long to Lincoln stories, and "and that
reminds me" was often on the lips of those I loved. All the tales told by
the faithful Herndon and the needlessly loyal Nicolay and Hay were current
coin, and the rehearsal of the Lincoln-Douglas debate was commonplace.

When our own poverty was mentioned, we compared it with the poverty that
Lincoln had endured, and felt rich. I slept in a garret where the winter's
snow used to sift merrily through the slab shingles, but then I was
covered with warm buffalo-robes, and a loving mother tucked me in and on
my forehead imprinted a goodnight kiss. But Lincoln at the same age had no
mother and lived in a hut that had neither windows, doors nor floor, and a
pile of leaves and straw in the corner was his bed. Our house had two
rooms, but one Winter the Lincoln home was only a shed enclosed on three
sides.

I knew of his being a clerk in a country store at the age of twenty, and
that up to that time he had read but four books; of his running a
flatboat, splitting rails, and poring at night over a dog-eared law-book;
of his asking to sleep in the law-office of Joshua Speed, and of Speed's
giving him permission to move in. And of his going away after his "worldly
goods" and coming back in ten minutes carrying an old pair of saddlebags,
which he threw into a corner saying, "Speed, I've moved!".

I knew of his twenty years of country law-practise, when he was considered
just about as good and no better than a dozen others on that circuit, and
of his making a bare living during that time. Then I knew of his gradually
awakening to the wrong of slavery, of the expansion of his mind, so that
he began to incur the jealousy of rivals and the hatred of enemies, and of
the prophetic feeling in that slow but sure moving mind that "a house
divided against itself can not stand. I believe this Government can not
endure permanently half-slave and half-free."

I knew of the