full and successful
share.

The man who could not pay a week's board bill was again elected to the
legislature, was invited to public banquets and toasted by name, became
a popular speaker, moved in the best society of the new capital, and
made, as his friends and neighbors declared, a brilliant marriage.

IV. CONGRESSMAN LINCOLN

Hopeful and cheerful as he ordinarily seemed, there was in Mr. Lincoln's
disposition a strain of deep melancholy. This was not peculiar to him
alone, for the pioneers as a race were somber rather than gay. Their
lives had been passed for generations under the most trying physical
conditions, near malaria-infested streams, and where they breathed the
poison of decaying vegetation. Insufficient shelter, storms, the cold of
winter, savage enemies, and the cruel labor that killed off all but the
hardiest of them, had at the same time killed the happy-go-lucky gaiety
of an easier form of life. They were thoughtful, watchful, wary; capable
indeed of wild merriment: but it has been said that although a pioneer
might laugh, he could not easily be made to smile. Lincoln's mind was
unusually sound and sane and normal. He had a cheerful, wholesome, sunny
nature, yet he had inherited the strongest traits of the pioneers,
and there was in him, moreover, much of the poet, with a poet's great
capacity for joy and pain. It is not strange that as he developed into
manhood, especially when his deeper nature began to feel the stirrings
of ambition and of love, these seasons of depression and gloom came upon
him with overwhelming force.

During his childhood he had known few women, save his mother, and that
kind, God-fearing woman his stepmother, who did so much to make his
childhood hopeful and happy. No man ever honored women more truly than
did Abraham Lincoln; while all the qualities that caused men to like
him--his strength, his ambition, his kindliness--served equally to make
him a favorite with them. In the years of his young manhood three women
greatly occupied his thoughts. The first was the slender, fair-haired
Ann Rutledge, whom he very likely saw for the first time as she stood
with the group of mocking people on the river-bank, near her father's
mill, the day Lincoln's flatboat stuck on the dam at New Salem. It was
her death, two years before he went to live at Springfield, that brought
on the first attack of melancholy of which we know, causing him such
deep grief that for a time his frie