first time, as it were, by himself."

[Illustration: VIEW FROM THE HILL ABOVE SANGAMON RIVER, LOOKING TOWARD
THE SITE OF NEW SALEM.]

"The village of New Salem, the scene of Lincoln's mercantile career,"
writes one of our correspondents who has studied the history of the
town and visited the spot where it once stood, "was one of the many
little towns which, in the pioneer days, sprang up along the Sangamon
River, a stream then looked upon as navigable and as destined to be
counted among the highways of commerce. Twenty miles northwest of
Springfield, strung along the left bank of the Sangamon, parted by
hollows and ravines, is a row of high hills. On one of these--a long,
narrow ridge, beginning with a sharp and sloping point near the river,
running south, and parallel with the stream a little way, and then,
reaching its highest point, making a sudden turn to the west, and
gradually widening until lost in the prairie--stood this frontier
village. The crooked river for a short distance comes from the east,
and, seeming surprised at meeting the bluff, abruptly changes its
course, and flows to the north. Across the river the bottom stretches
out, reaching half a mile back to the highlands. New Salem, founded in
1829 by James Rutledge and John Cameron, and a dozen years later a
deserted village, is rescued from oblivion only by the fact that
Lincoln was once one of its inhabitants. His first sight of the town
had been in April, 1831, when the flatboat he had built and its little
crew were detained in getting their boat over the Rutledge and Cameron
mill-dam, on which it lodged. When Lincoln walked into New Salem,
three months later, he was not altogether a stranger, for the people
remembered him as the ingenious flatboat-man who, a little while
before, had freed his boat from water (and thus enabled it to get over
the dam) by resorting to the miraculous expedient of boring a hole in
the bottom."[B]

Offutt's goods had not arrived when Mr. Lincoln reached New Salem; and
he "loafed" about, so those who remember his arrival say,
good-naturedly taking a hand in whatever he could find to do, and in
his droll way making friends of everybody. By chance, a bit of work
fell to him almost at once, which introduced him generally and gave
him an opportunity to make a name in the neighborhood. It was election
day. The village school-master, Mentor Graham by name, was clerk, but
the assistant was ill. Looking about for some one to he