More books were coming now. A man named Jones opened an opposition store at Gentryville, and he took a personal liking to Abe Lincoln. Apart from mere friendship, he saw that so popular a youngster could not fail to attract customers, and so, for a time that sufficed for reading every book owned by Mr. Jones, Abe acted as a sort of clerk and salesman for him. He kept no books of account and did not acquire the finer mysteries of merchandise; but he could pack and unpack goods, attend to customers, crack jokes with idlers, keep the place looking busy, and increase his peculiar knowledge of the world he was to live in. It was every way as valuable to him, as a piece of schooling, as would have been another winter term under Andrew Crawford.

During this part of his motley education Abe made himself the star orator of the Gentryville "speaking-matches." These were carried on in a rude kind of debating club, and the range of topics discussed was a wide one. Both the consciousness and the love of oratorical power began to grow strong within him. At the same time he was thirsting for a deeper knowledge of law and justice than could be sifted from the Revised Statutes of Indiana.

The county-seat of Warrick County was but fifteen miles from Gentryville. Courts were held there at certain seasons of the year, and judges sat to hear causes, and juries listened to testimony and arguments and rendered verdicts.

There, too, men were tried for crimes, and some received the penalty of their evil deeds. Others, again, came forth free and in a manner distinguished, with the thrilling story of their trial and escape to tell ever afterwards, as the choicest bit of frontier history known to them. It was no small thing for any man that he had been actually tried and acquitted of something serious, and he took a kind of rank proportioned to the magnitude and peril of his ordeal.

A little walk of fifteen miles in the early morning, and with no more to walk in returning after nightfall, could hardly in

terfere with the attendance at court of a student combining Abe's length of limb with his eagerness for law. He was sure to be among the audience in the court-room whenever he could escape from other duties. Not the judge himself, nor any jury, attended more zealously the fortunes of every case he heard.

One day a man was on trial for murder, and had secured for his defence a lawyer of more than common ability named John Breckinridge. Abraham Lincoln had been exceedingly interested in the case from the beginning; but when the time came for the prisoner's counsel to speak in his defence, there was a surprise prepared for the young Gentryville debater. He had never, until that day, listened to a really good argument, delivered by a man of learning and eloquence, but he had prepared himself to know and profit by such an experience when it came to him. He listened as if he had himself been the prisoner whose life depended upon the success of Mr. Breckinridge in persuading the jury of his innocence.

Other juries, long afterwards, were to learn how profound and successful had been the study the rough backwoods boy was then giving to the great art of persuading the minds of men. Millions of his fellow-citizens were to bear witness to the capacity he was then developing of so uttering a thought that those who heard or read the utterance could never afterwards tear that thought out of their memories.

Abraham Lincoln learned much from the great speech; but he had yet a deep and bitter lesson to receive that day. The lines of social caste were somewhat rigidly drawn at that time. A leading lawyer of good family like Mr. Breckinridge was a "gentleman," and a species of great man not to be carelessly addressed by half-clad boors from the new settlements.

Abe forgot all that; perhaps not knowing it very well. He could not repress his enthusiasm over that magnificent appeal to the judge and jury. The last sentence of the speech had hardly died away before he was pushing through the throng

towards the gifted orator. Mr. Breckinridge was walking grandly out of the court-room, when there stood in his path a gigantic, solemn-visaged, beardless clodhopper, reaching out a long coatless arm, with an immense hard hand at the end of it, while an agitated voice expressed the heartiest commendation of the ability and eloquence of his plea for his client.

Breckinridge was a small-souled man in spite of his mental power and his training, for he did but glance in proud amazement at the shabby, presumptuous boy, and then pass stupidly on without speaking. He had imparted priceless instruction to a fellow who had yet but a faint perception of the artificial barriers before him.

The two met again, at the city of Washington, in the year 1862, under other circumstances, and then the President of the United States again complimented Mr. Breckinridge upon the excellence of his speech in the Indiana murder-case.

The precise information conveyed to Abe, whether or not he mentally put it into form, was that he was a "poor white" and of no account; a species of human trash to whom the respect due to all recognized manhood did not belong. He forgave the man who told him what he was, but he never ceased to profit by the stinging, wholesome information.

It was but a little while afterwards, while he was temporarily employed by old Josiah Crawford, and when he had worried good Mrs. Crawford overmuch by the fun and uproar he created in her kitchen, that she asked him,

"Now, Abe, what on earth do you s'pose'll ever become of ye? What'll you be good for if you keep a-goin' on in this way?"

"Well," slowly responded Abe, "I reckon I'm goin' to be President of the United States one of these days."

He said it soberly enough. And that was not the only occasion upon which there fell from his lips some strange, extravagant expression of his inner thought that there was a great work for him to do somewhere in the future. He could plow, chop

wood, 'tend store, do errands, make fun, now; but he could all the while feel that he was growing, growing, and that this would not last forever. He could feel that the change continually going forward within him could not be with reference to such a life as he was leading, or to such as he saw led by the full-grown and elderly men around him. For him there was, there must be, something more and higher, and he was blindly reaching out after it, day by day; but all the others deemed him as one of themselves; better than some, it might be, but very much below any young man whose father could give him a good farm and some hogs and a little ready money.

CHAPTER IX.

THE FLATBOAT.

A Trading Voyage-Life in the Southern States-First View of Human Slavery-1828.

ABE LINCOLN had made himself the best known and most popular young fellow in all the region round about Gentryville; but although the whole country liked him, he did not at all like the country. He was now nineteen years of age, but was still subject to his father's authority, and Tom Lincoln was not the man to surrender his legal right to the wages of his stalwart son. All rates for farm-labor were low, however, and there was none too much of it to be sold, at any price, in a community where most men could do all their own work and have ample time left for lounging at neighboring cabins or around the village grocery.

Abe had long since given up the idea of earning a living behind the counter of Jones's store, or any other that he knew of. He was under bonds to his father, but he made an attempt to obtain employment as a boat-hand on the river. His age was against him in his first effort, but his opportunity was coming to him. In the month of March, 1828, he hired himself to Mr. Gentry, the great man of Gentryville. His duties were to be mainly performed at Gentry's Landing, near Rockport, on the Ohio River. There was a great enterprise on foot, or rather in the water, at Gentry's Landing, for a flatboat belonging to the proprietor was loading with bacon and other produce for a trading trip down the Mississippi to New Orleans. She was to be under the command of young Allen Gentry, but would never return to the Ohio, for flatboats are built to go down with the stream and not for pulling against it.