Once more the pathway to success seemed for a moment to be barred before him, and once more an altogether unlookedfor opening appeared.

Mr. Calhoun, surveyor of Sangamon County, was overrun with business, and needed an assistant. Immigrants and landbuyers were pouring into the prairie country in a constantly increasing stream. It was necessary that their demands should be met, and that the surveying called for should be honestly and faithfully done. The temptations to carelessness and corruption were many. Mr. Calhoun knew Abe Lincoln and trusted him thoroughly. He also knew him to be ignorant of surveying, but he went to see him about it. He took with him a book of instruction in the art, and told Abe that as soon as he should be ready to go to work he should have as much as he could do.

That was enough for the man of iron perseverance. He took the book on surveying and went out into the country to board with Minter Graham, the same schoolmaster with whom he had consulted about English grammar. In six weeks he was ready to report to Mr. Calhoun for service. They had been weeks of precisely such unflinching mental toil as he had 7for so long a time trained himself to endure.

Thenceforward there was no danger but what he could pay his board-bills. His work was found to stand all tests of accuracy, and Mr. Calhoun kept his word about giving him enough of it. In all the intervals of that employment he struggled on with his law-books. He even walked all the way to Springfield and back to borrow of a friend there a volume he could not afford to buy.

Once more a public employment came to him, though a marvelously small one, for on the 7th of May, 1833, he was appointed postmaster of New Salem. There is no record of where he kept that "post-office," but there is a legend that he kept it in his hat. The people of New Salem had few correspondents, and the mail did not arrive every day. Indeed, one

of the special and important duties of the postmaster was to read and even to write letters for those whose lack of education forbade their doing either for themselves. Here was a curious mixture of occupations, truly; but there was life for the present and hope for the future. The prospect would not have been at all gloomy if it had not been for the store and the cloud of debts which hung over it.

The Trent brothers kept the business going for a few months, and then they gave it up and ran away, never again to be heard of in New Salem. Berry also departed from the scene of his misbehavior. He did not live long afterwards. Even before he went away, the accumulated load of debt for all those rash purchases "on time" came drifting back upon the shoulders of the one honest and hard-working man whose name was signed to the notes of hand.

Abraham Lincoln could not run away. Still less could he pay the notes. He was able to make arrangement for the future payment of such of them as were held by his friends, for every man of them trusted his honesty entirely and never dreamed of pressing him. In their eyes he was an ill-used man, and his misfortunes in business made them more his friends than ever. One only of the notes had drifted away through the hands of successive holders beyond all friendly control. It was the one for four hundred dollars given to Mr. Radford for the wreck of his store and stock the night before the day on which Bill Green's good bargain had been taken off his hands. This piece of paper was now held by a Mr. Van Bergen, and he sued upon it, and of course obtained an immediate judgment against Lincoln. An execution was issued, and the iron hand of the sheriff was held out for all the debtor's personal property. His few books could not be touched, under the exemption law, but his horse, saddle, bridle, surveyor's instruments of all kinds, the tools of his new trade, were seized upon without pity. Their loss might take away his means of livelihood and break up his growing business, but it could not

really set him back one step behind the point to which he had so steadily worked his way. Among the many friends he had made was a well-to-do farmer named Short, and this man, unsolicited, joined Lincoln in giving to the sheriff the needful bond that the goods should be delivered on the day of sale, so that their owner could use them meantime.

Lincoln did not attend the sale of his property, but Mr. Short was there with another of his friends named Greene. Between them they bought back all that the sheriff had seized, at the sum of two hundred and forty-five dollars. They divided their outlay nearly equally between them, and at once turned over their purchases to the man they had come to help, waiting for repayment until he should be able to earn the money.

The remainder of that summer was a busy time for the post-master, the deputy county surveyor, and the one law-student. of New Salem. To all his other work was now added the con-tinual reference to him of small legal matters, such as the drawing up of deeds and other papers. He even "pettifogged" small cases before justices of the peace, but for all these acts of neighborly kindness he never thought of charging a fee. Nor was this all the duty forced upon him by the unbounded confidence men had acquired in his fairness and integrity.

The one great sport of that region was horse-racing. There were many horses of many kinds, and there was a continual succession of "matches" between them, but the human beings were few indeed by whose decisions, as judges of the result, all contestants were willing to abide. Much against his will, therefore, Abe was frequently compelled to yield to the unanimous popular demand, and sit in "the judges' stand" while the horses were running. He had plenty of disputes to settle, but it was of no use for any disappointed or quarrelsome jockey to appeal from or severely criticise a decision made by Abe Lincoln. Once uttered, it had all the force of law.

In spite of his hard study and his lack of any bodily toil to maintain the hardness of his muscles, his strength seemed to increase rather than diminish. Harnessed by shoulder-straps to a box of stones weighing half a ton, he lifted it repeatedly and with ease. This and other feats of a similar nature enabled him to maintain his place as a keeper of the peace and a recognized disturber of all ruffianism. No fight could be fought out in the old-time way if Lincoln were at hand to interfere with it. It was so easy for him to take an angry man in each hand and hold two foolish fellows wide apart, until they should agree with him to let the matter drop and make the quarrel up. As a rule, moreover, at least one of the two men was likely to think more highly than ever of the rough peacemaker.

CHAPTER XIV.

FIRST LOVE.

A true Romance-Elected to the State Legislature—A new Suit-Free thinking.

THE honest and upright ambition of Abraham Lincoln to make a man of himself had needed no spurring. There were within him springs of life and thought as yet unopened and of whose existence he was hitherto ignorant. These were now to be discovered to him, and a new and strong incentive to exertion was to add its power to the other forces which were urging him upward.

The third child of Mr. James Rutledge, Lincoln's devoted friend and admirer, was a girl of high principle and uncommon beauty. In all the country around there was no maiden to be compared with fair Ann Rutledge. Her mental accomplishments were only such as could then be obtained in Illinois by the daughter of a country merchant of intelligence and property, but they were sufficient. She could not fail to have admirers; and when, in the second year of Lincoln's New Salem life, he came to board for a while with her father, she was already promised in marriage to his friend McNeil, a young and thriving trader and farmer of New Salem. There came to her soon afterwards a strange, romantic history. Her betrothed revealed to her the fact that his name was not McNeil but McNamar, and that he had so concealed his identity in coming West that he might build a fortune unknown to his family and then return to care for his father in his old age. He was now closing up his business, turning his property into money,