and observed. It is natural that she should desire to remain with her
relations and friends. As to friends, _she_ should not need them
anywhere--she would have them in abundance here. Give my kind regards to
Mr. ---- and his family, particularly to Miss E. Also to your mother,
brothers and sisters. Ask little E. D---- if she will ride to town with me
if I come there again. And, finally, give ---- a double reciprocation of
all the love she sent me. Write me often, and believe me, yours forever,
LINCOLN."

Lincoln's Mother--How He Loved Her.

"A great man," says J. G. Holland, "never drew his infant life from a
purer or more womanly bosom than her own; and Mr. Lincoln always looked
back to her with unspeakable affection. Long after her sensitive heart and
weary hands had crumbled into dust, and had climbed to life again in
forest flowers, he said to a friend, with tears in his eyes: 'All that I
am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother--blessings on her memory!'"
She was five feet, five inches high, a slender, pale, sad and sensitive
woman, with much in her nature that was truly heroic, and much that shrank
from the rude life around her.

Her death occurred in 1818, scarcely two years after her removal from
Kentucky to Indiana, and when Abraham was in his tenth year. They laid her
to rest under the trees near their cabin home, and, sitting on her grave,
the little boy wept his irreparable loss.

Gen. Linder's Early Recollections--Amusing Stories.

I did not travel, says Gen. Linder, on the circuit in 1835, on account of
my health and the health of my wife, but attended court at Charleston that
fall, held by Judge Grant, who had exchanged circuits with our judge,
Justin Harlan.

It was here I first met Abraham Lincoln, of Springfield, at that time a
very retiring and modest young man, dressed in a plain suit of mixed
jeans. He did not make any marked impression upon me, or any other member
of the bar. He was on a visit to his relations in Coles, where his father
and stepmother lived, and some of her children.

Lincoln put up at the hotel, and here was where I saw him. Whether he was
reading law at this time I cannot say. Certain it is, he had been admitted
to the bar, although he had some celebrity, having been a captain in the
Blackhawk campaign, and served a term in the Illinois Legislature; but if
he won any fame at that season I have never heard of it. He had been one