"My early history," said Mr. Lincoln to J. L. Scripps, "is perfectly characterized by a single line of Gray's Elegy:

The short and simple annals of the poor.""

A GENTLEMAN who knew Mr. Lincoln well in early manhood says: "Lincoln at this period had nothing but plenty of friends."

SAYS J. G. Holland: "No man ever lived, probably, who was more a self-made man than Abraham Lincoln. Not a circumstance of life favored the development which he had reached."

In his seventh year Lincoln attended his first school. Zacharia Riney, a Catholic, whose memory Lincoln always revered, was the teacher. Caleb Hazel was the second teacher, under whose instructions Lincoln learned to write a good legible hand in three months.

AFTER the customary hand-shaking, on one occasion at Washington, several gentlemen came forward and asked the President for his autograph. One of them gave his name as "Cruikshank." "That reminds me," said Mr. Lincoln," of what I used to be called when a young man'Long-shanks!" "

MR. HOLLAND says: "Lincoln was a religious man. The fact may be stated without any reservation--with only an explanation. He believed in God, and in His personal supervision of the affairs of men. He believed himself to be under His control and guidance. He believed in the power and ultimate triumph of the right, through his belief in God."

GOVERNOR YATES, in a speech at Springfield, before a meeting at which William G. Greene presided, quoted Mr. Greene as having said that the first time he ever saw Lincoln he was "in the Sangamon River, with his trousers

rolled up five feet more or less, trying to pilot a flat-boat over a mill-dam. The boat was so full of water that it was hard to manage. Lincoln got the prow over, and then, instead of waiting to bail the water out, bored a hole through the projecting part, and let it run out.”

A PROMINENT writer says: "Lincoln was a child-like man. No public man of modern days has been fortunate enough to carry into his manhood so much of the directness, truthfulness, and simplicity of childhood as distinguished him. He was exactly what he seemed.

MR. LINCOLN and Douglas met for the first time when the latter was only 23 years of age. Lincoln, in speaking of the fact, subsequently said that Douglas was then “the least man he ever saw." He was not only very short, but very slender.

LINCOLN's mother died in 1818, scarcely two years after her removal to Indiana from Kentucky, and when Abraham was in his tenth year. They laid her to rest under the trees near the cabin, and, sitting on her grave, the little boy wept his irreparable loss.

THE Black Hawk war was not a very remarkable affair. It made no military reputations, but it was noteworthy in the single fact that the two simplest, homliest and truest men engaged in it afterward became Presidents of the United States, viz: General (then Colonel) Zachary Taylor, and Abraham Lincoln. Mr. Lincoln never spoke of it as anything more than an interesting episode in his life, except upon one occasion when he used it as an instrument for turning the military pretensions of another into ridicule.

PROFESSIONAL LIFE STORIES.

How Lincoln and Judge B- Swapped Horses.

When Abraham Lincoln was a lawyer in Illinois, he and a certain Judge once got to bantering one another about trading horses; and it was agreed that the next morning at 9 o'clock they should make a trade, the horses to be unseen up to that hour, and no backing out, under a forfeiture of $25.

At the hour appointed the Judge came up, leading the sorriest-looking specimen of a horse ever seen in those parts. In a few minutes Mr. Lincoln was seen approaching with a wooden saw-horse upon his shoulders. Great were the shouts and the laughter of the crowd, and both were greatly increased when Mr. Lincoln, on surveying the Judge's animal, set down his saw-horse, and exclaimed: "Well, Judge, this is the first time I ever got the worst of it in a horse trade."

A Remarkable Law Suit About a Colt-How Lincoln Won the Case-Thirty-Four Men Against Thirty Men and Two Brutes.

The controversy was about a colt, in which thirty-four witnesses swore that they had known the colt from its falling, and that it was the property of the plaintiff, while thirty swore that they had known the colt from its falling, and that it was the property of the defendant. It may be stated, at starting, that these witnesses were all honest, and that the mistake grew out of the exact resemblances which two colts bore to each other.