had better not do it.  You have not been accustomed to hardship, and it may be more severe than you now imagine.  I know you are capable of thinking correctly on any subject, and if you deliberate maturely upon this before you decide, then I am willing to abide your decision.”

[Illustration:  (MAP OF ILLINOIS ILLUSTRATING “An Act to establish and maintain a General System of Internal Improvements, in force 27th Feb. 1837”)

When the Illinois legislature adopted the above plan of internal improvement in 1837, there was in the whole United States only about eleven hundred miles of railroad.  The above scheme provided for thirteen hundred and fifty.  The basis of the outlines used by the committee in developing the plan was contained in a series of resolutions offered in the beginning of the session by Stephen A. Douglas.  In the house the vote on the bill stood sixty-one in favor to twenty-five against.]

This decidedly dispassionate view of their relation seems not to have brought any decision from Miss Owens; for three months later Mr. Lincoln wrote her an equally judicial letter, telling her that he could not think of her “with entire indifference,” that he in all cases wanted to do right and “most particularly so in all cases with women,” and summing up his position as follows: 

“What I do wish is that our further acquaintance shall depend upon yourself.  If such further acquaintance would contribute nothing to your happiness, I am sure it would not to mine.  If you feel yourself in any degree bound to me, I am now willing to release you, provided you wish it; while, on the other hand, I am willing and even anxious to bind you faster, if I can be convinced that it will in any considerable degree add to your happiness.  This, indeed, is the whole question with me.  Nothing would make me more miserable than to believe you miserable—­nothing more happy than to know you were so.”

Miss Owens had enough discernment to recognize the disinterestedness of this love-making, and she refused Mr. Lincoln’s offer.  She found him “deficient in those little links which make up the chain of a woman’s happiness,” she said.  The affair seems to have been a rather vigorous flirtation on her part, which had interested and perhaps flattered Mr. Lincoln.  In the sincerity of his nature he feared he had awakened a genuine attachment, and his notions of honor compelled him to find out.  When finally refused, he wrote a description of the affair to a friend, in which he ridiculed himself unmercifully: 

“I was mortified, it seemed to me, in a hundred different ways.  My vanity was deeply wounded by the reflection that I had so long been too stupid to discover her intentions, and at the same time never doubting that I understood them perfectly; and also that she, whom I had taught myself to believe nobody else would have, had actually rejected me with all my fancied greatness.