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 of Lincoln-Some Amusing Stories of Lincoln's Uncle Mord.

I did not travel, says General 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 IIarlan. It was here I first met Abraham Lincoln, of Springfield, at that time a very modest and retiring 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. IIe 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 can not say. Certain it is, he had not 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 of the representatives from Sangamon. If Lincoln at this time felt the divine afflatus of greatness stir within him I have never heard of it. It

was rather common among us then in the West to suppose that there was no Presidential timber growing in the Northwest, yet, he doubtless had at that time the stuff out of which to make half a dozen Presidents.

I had known his relatives in Kentucky, and he asked me about them. His uncle, Mordecai Lincoln, I had known form my boyhood, and he was naturally a man of considerable genius; he was a man of great drollery, and it would almost make you laugh to look at him. I never saw but one other man whose quiet, droll look excited in me the same disposition to laugh, and that was Artemas Ward. He was quite a story-teller, and in this Abe resembled his Uncle Mord, as we all called him. He was an honest man, as tender-hearted as a woman, and to the last degree charitable and benevolent.

No one ever took offense at Uncle Mord's stories--not even the ladies. I heard him once tell a bevy of fashionable girls that he knew a very large woman who had a husband so small that in the night she often mistook him for the baby, and that upon one occasion she took him up and was singing to him a soothing lullaby, when he awoke and told her that she was mistaken, that the baby was on the other side of the bed.

Lincoln had a very high opinion of his uncle, and on one occasion he said to me: "Linder, I have often said that Uncle Mord had run off with the talents of the family."

Old Mord, as we sometimes called him, had been in his younger days a very stout man, and was quite fond of playing a game of fisticuffs with any one who was noted as a champion. He told a parcel of us once of a pitched battle he had fought with one of the champions of that day. He said they fought on the side of a hill or ridge; that at the bottom there was a rut or canal, which had been cut out by the freshets. He said they soon clinched, and he threw his

man and fell on top of him. He said he always thought he had the best eyes in the world for measuring distances, and having measured the distance to the bottom of the hill, he concluded that by rolling over and over till they came to the bottom his antagonist's body would fill it, and he would be wedged in so tight that he could whip him at his leisure. So he let the fellow turn him, and over and over they went, when about the twentieth revolution brought Uncle Mord's back in contact with the bottom of the rut, "and," said he, "before fire could scorch a feather, I cried out in stentorian voice: Take him off!'"

Young Lincoln and the "Clary's Grove Boys"—A Wrestling Match and How it Terminated.

There lived at the time young Lincoln resided at New Salem, Illinois, in and around the village, a band of rollicking fellows, or, more properly, roystering rowdies, known as the "Clary's Grove Boys." The special tie that united them was physical courage and prowess. These fellows, although they embraced in their number many men who have since become respectable and influential, were wild and rough beyond toleration in any community not made up like that which produced them. They pretended to be "regulators," and were the terror of all who did not acknowledge their rule; and their mode of securing allegiance was by flogging every man who failed to acknowledge it. They took it upon themselves to try the mettle of every new comer, and to learn the sort of stuff he was made of. Some of their number was appointed to fight, wrestle, or run a foot-race with each incoming stranger. Of course Abraham Lincoln was obliged to pass the ordeal.

Perceiving that he was a man who would not easily be floored, they selected their champion, Jack Armstrong, and

imposed upon him the task of laying Lincoln upon his back. There is no evidence that Lincoln was an unwilling party in the sport, for it was what he had always been accustomed to. The bout was entered upon, but Armstrong soon discovered that he had met with more than his match. The "Boys" were looking on, and, seeing that their champion was likely to get the worst of it, did after the manner of such irresponsible bands. They gathered around Lincoln, struck and disabled him, and then Armstrong, by "legging" him, got him down.

Most men would have been indignant, not to say furiously angry, under such foul treatment as this; but if Lincoln was either, he did not show it. Getting up in perfect good humor, he fell to laughing over his discomfiture, and joking about it. They had all calculated upon making him angry, and then they intended, with the amiable spirit which characterized the "Clary's Grove Boys," to give him a terrible drubbing. They were disappointed, and, in their admiration of him, immediately invited him to become one of the company.

A Batch of Lincoln Reminiscences — The Turning Point in the Great Man's Life.

it was while young Lincoln was engaged in the duties of Offutt's store that the turning point in his life occurred. Here he commenced the study of English grammar. There was not a text-book to be obtained in the neighborhood, but, hearing that there was a copy of Kirkham's Grammar in the possession of a person seven or eight miles distant, he walked to his house and succeeded in borrowing it.

L. M. Green, a lawyer of Petersburg, in Menard County, says that every time he visited New Salem, at this period, Lincoln took him out upon a hill, and asked him to explain

some point in Kirkham that had given him trouble. After having mastered the book, he remarked to a friend, that if that was what they called a science, he thought he could "subdue another."

Mr. Green says that Mr. Lincoln's talk at this time showed that he was beginning to think of a great life and a great destiny. Lincoln said to him, on one occasion, that all his family seemed to have good sense, but, somehow, none had ever become distinguished. He thought that perhaps he might become so. He had talked, he said, with men who had the reputation of being great men, but he could not see that they differed much from others!

During this year, he was also much engaged with debating clubs, often walking six or seven miles to attend them. One of these clubs held its meetings at an old storehouse in New Salem, and the first speech young Lincoln ever made was made there. He used to call the exercise

"practicing polemics.' As these clubs were composed principally of men of no education whatever, some of their "polemics" are remembered as the most laughable of farces.

His favorite newspaper, at this time, was the Louisville Journal, a paper which he received regularly by mail, and paid for during a number of years when he had not money enough to dress decently. He liked its politics, and was particularly delighted with its wit and humor, of which he had the keenest appreciation. When out of the store, he was always busy in the pursuit of knoge.

One gentleman who met him during this period, says that the first time he saw him he was lying on a trundlebed, covered with books and papers, and rocking a cradle with his foot. The whole scene, however, was entirely characteristic Lincoln reading and studying, and at the same time helping his landlady by quieting her child.