As soon as the ice had well melted from the river, the voyage was begun.  Besides Captain Lincoln there was only one man in the crew, and that was a son of Mr. Gentry’s.

The voyage was a long and weary one, but at last the two boatmen reached the great southern city.  Here they saw many strange things of which they had never heard before.  But they soon sold their cargo and boat, and then returned home on a steamboat.

To Abraham Lincoln the world was now very different from what it had seemed before.  He longed to be away from the narrow life in the woods of Spencer county.  He longed to be doing something for himself—­to be making for himself a fortune and a name.

But then he remembered his mother’s teachings when he sat on her knee in the old Kentucky home, “Always do right.”  He remembered her last words, “I know you will be kind to your father.”

And so he resolved to stay with his father, to work for him, and to give him all his earnings until he was twenty-one years old.

* * * * *

VII.—­THE FIRST YEARS IN ILLINOIS.

Early in the spring of 1830, Thomas Lincoln sold his farm in Indiana, and the whole family moved to Illinois.  The household goods were put in a wagon drawn by four yoke of oxen.  The kind step-mother and her daughters rode also in the wagon.

Abraham Lincoln, with a long whip in his hand, trudged through the mud by the side of the road and guided the oxen.  Who that saw him thus going into Illinois would have dreamed that he would in time become that state’s greatest citizen?

The journey was a long and hard one; but in two weeks they reached Decatur, where they had decided to make their new home.

Abraham Lincoln was now over twenty-one years old.  He was his own man.  But he stayed with his father that spring.  He helped him fence his land; he helped him plant his corn.

But his father had no money to give him.  The young man’s clothing was all worn out, and he had nothing with which to buy any more.  What should he do?

Three miles from his father’s cabin there lived a thrifty woman, whose name was Nancy Miller.  Mrs. Miller owned a flock of sheep, and in her house there were a spinning-wheel and a loom that were always busy.  And so you must know that she wove a great deal of jeans and home-made cloth.

Abraham Lincoln bargained with this woman to make him a pair of trousers.  He agreed that for each yard of cloth required, he would split for her four hundred rails.

He had to split fourteen hundred rails in all; but he worked so fast that he had finished them before the trousers were ready.

The next April saw young Lincoln piloting another flatboat down the Mississippi to New Orleans.  His companion this time was his mother’s relative, John Hanks.  This time he stayed longer in New Orleans, and he saw some things which he had barely noticed on his first trip.