A more satisfactory form of intellectual effervescence consisted in writing articles on the American Government, Temperance, etc., and in speech-making to any who were near at the moment of inspiration.  There is abundant evidence, also, that already Lincoln was regarded as a witty fellow, a rare mimic, and teller of jokes and stories; and therefore was the champion of the fields and the favorite of all the primitive social gatherings.  This sort of life and popularity had its perils, for in that day and region men seldom met without drinking together; but all authorities are agreed that Lincoln, while the greatest talker, was the smallest drinker.

The stories told of his physical strength rival those which decorate the memory of Hercules.  Others, which show his kindly and humane nature, are more valuable.  Any or all of these may or may not be true, and, though they are not so poetical or marvelous as the myths which lend an antique charm to the heroes of classic and romantic lore, yet they compare fairly well with those which Weems has twined about the figure of the youthful Washington.  There is a tale of the rescue of a pig from a quagmire, and another of the saving of a drunken man from freezing.  There are many stories of fights; others of the lifting of enormous weights; and even some of the doing of great feats of labor in a day, though for such tasks Lincoln had no love.  These are not worth recounting; there is store of such in every village about the popular local hero; and though historians by such folk-lore may throw a glamour about Lincoln’s daily life, he himself, at the time, could hardly have seen much that was romantic or poetical in the routine of ill-paid labor and hard living.  Until he came of age his “time” belonged to his father, who let him out to the neighbors for any job that offered, making him a man-of-all-work, without-doors and within.  In 1825 he was thus earning six dollars a month, presumably besides board and lodging.  Sometimes he slaughtered hogs, at thirty-one cents a day; and in this “rough work” he was esteemed especially efficient.  Such was the making of a President in the United States in this nineteenth century!

Thomas Lincoln, like most men of his stamp, had the cheerful habit of laying the results of his own worthlessness to the charge of the conditions about him, which, naturally, he constantly sought to change, since it seemed that no change could bring him to a lower level than he had already found.  As Abraham approached his “freedom-day,” his luckless parent conceived the notion that he might do better in Illinois than he had done in Indiana.  So he shuffled off the farm, for which he had never paid, and about the middle of February the family caravan, with their scanty household wares packed in an ox team, began a march which lasted fourteen days and entailed no small measure of hardship.  They finally stopped at a bluff on the north bank of the north fork of the