He had found that people listened to him, that they quoted his opinions, and that his friends were already saying that he was able to fill any position.  Offutt even declared the country over that “Abe knew more than any man in the United States,” and “some day he would be President.”

[Illustration:  John A. Clary.

John A. Clary was one of the “Clary’s Grove Boys.”  He was a son of John Clary, the head of the numerous Clary family which settled in the vicinity of New Salem in 1818.  He was born in Tennessee in 1815 and died in 1880.  He was an intimate associate of Lincoln during the latter’s New Salem days.]

Under this stimulus Lincoln’s ambition increased.  “I have talked with great men,” he told his fellow-clerk and friend, Greene, “and I do not see how they differ from others.”  He made up his mind to put himself before the public, and talked of his plans to his friends.  In order to keep in practice in speaking he walked seven or eight miles to debating clubs.  “Practising polemics” was what he called the exercise.  He seems now for the first time to have begun to study subjects.  Grammar was what he chose.  He sought Mentor Graham, the schoolmaster, and asked his advice.  “If you are going before the public,” Mr. Graham told him, “you ought to do it.”  But where could he get a grammar?  There was but one, said Mr. Graham, in the neighborhood, and that was six miles away.  Without waiting further information the young man rose from the breakfast-table, walked immediately to the place, borrowed this rare copy of Kirkham’s Grammar, and before night was deep into its mysteries.  From that time on for weeks he gave every moment of his leisure to mastering the contents of the book.  Frequently he asked his friend Greene to “hold the book” while he recited, and, when puzzled by a point, he would consult Mr. Graham.

Lincoln’s eagerness to learn was such that the whole neighborhood became interested.  The Greenes lent him books, the schoolmaster kept him in mind and helped him as he could, and even the village cooper let him come into his shop and keep up a fire of shavings sufficiently bright to read by at night.  It was not long before the grammar was mastered.  “Well,” Lincoln said to his fellow-clerk, Greene, “if that’s what they call a science, I think I’ll go at another.”  He had made another discovery—­that he could conquer subjects.

[Illustration:  Site of Denton Offutt’s store.

From a photograph taken for this Magazine.

The building in which Lincoln clerked for Denton Offutt was standing as late as 1836, and presumably stood until it rotted down.  A slight depression in the earth, evidently once a cellar, is all that remains of Offutt’s store.  Out of this hole in the ground have grown three trees, a locust, an elm, and a sycamore, seeming to spring from the same roots, and curiously twined together; and high up on the sycamore some genius has chiselled the face of Lincoln.]