than mere freedom to be himself.  Two characteristics that were so significant in his childhood continued with growing vitality in his young manhood:  his placidity and his intense sense of comradeship.  The latter, however, had undergone a change.  It was no longer the comradeship of the wild creatures.  That spurt of physical expansion, the swift rank growth to his tremendous stature, swept him apparently across a dim dividing line, out of the world of birds and beasts and into the world of men.  He took the new world with the same unfailing but also unexcitable curiosity with which he had taken the other, the world of squirrels, flowers, fawns.

Here as there, the difference from his mother, deep though their similarities may have been, was sharply evident.  Had he been wholly at one with her religiously, the gift of telling speech which he now began to display might have led him into a course that would have rejoiced her heart, might have made him a boy preacher, and later, a great revivalist.  His father and elder sister while on Pigeon Creek joined the local Baptist Church.  But Abraham did not follow them.  Nor is there a single anecdote linking him in any way with the fervors of camp meeting.  On the contrary, what little is remembered, is of a cool aloofness.(4) The inscrutability of the forest was his—­what it gave to the stealthy, cautious men who were too intent on observing, too suspiciously watchful, to give vent to their feelings.  Therefore, in Lincoln there was always a double life, outer and inner, the outer quietly companionable, the inner, solitary, mysterious.

It was the outer life that assumed its first definite phase in the years on Pigeon Creek.  During those years, Lincoln discovered his gift of story-telling.  He also discovered humor.  In the employment of both talents, he accepted as a matter of course the tone of the young ruffians among whom he dwelt.  Very soon this powerful fellow, who could throw any of them in a wrestle, won the central position among them by a surer title, by the power to delight.  And any one who knows how peasant schools of art arise—­for that matter, all schools of art that are vital—­knows how he did it.  In this connection, his famous biographers, Nicolay and Hay, reveal a certain externality by objecting that a story attributed to him is ancient.  All stories are ancient.  Not the tale, but the telling, as the proverb says, is the thing.  In later years, Lincoln wrote down every good story that he heard, and filed it.(5) When it reappeared it had become his own.  Who can doubt that this deliberate assimilation, the typical artistic process, began on Pigeon Creek?  Lincoln never would have captured as he did his plowboy audience, set them roaring with laughter in the intervals of labor, had he not given them back their own tales done over into new forms brilliantly beyond their powers of conception.  That these tales were gross, even ribald, might have been taken for granted, even had we not positive evidence of the fact.  Otherwise none of that uproarious laughter which we may be sure sounded often across shimmering harvest fields while stalwart young pagans, ever ready to pause, leaned, bellowing, on the handles of their scythes, Abe Lincoln having just then finished a story.