“He is a very great man,” Abe exclaimed.

“Have you learned that last noble flight of his in the reply to Hayne as you promised?” Kelso asked.

“I have,” said Abe, “and the other day when I was tramping back from Bowlin Green’s I came across a drove of cattle and stopped and gave it to them.  They all let go of the grass and stood looking.  By an’ by the bull thought he’d stood it as long as he could an’ bellered back at me.”

“Good!  Now stand up and let us see how you imitate the great chief of the Whig clan,” said Kelso.

The lank and awkward youth rose and began to speak the lines in a high pitched voice that trembled with excitement.  It lowered and steadied and rang out like noble music on a well played trumpet as the channel of his spirit filled with the mighty current of the orator’s passion.  Then, indeed, the words fell from his lips “like the winter snows.”

“They shook our hearts as the wind shakes the branches of a tree,” Samson writes in his diary.  “The lean, bony body of the boy was transfigured and as I looked at his face in the firelight I thought it was handsome.

“Not a word was spoken for a minute after he sat down.  I had got my first look at Lincoln.  I had seen his soul.  I think it was then I began to realize that a man was being made among us ’more precious than fine gold; even a man more precious than the golden wedge of Ophir.’”

The Doctor gazed in silence at the boy.  Kelso sat with both hands in his pockets and his chin upon his breast looking solemnly into the fire.

“Thank you, Abe,” he said in a low voice.  “Something unusual has happened and I’m just a little scared.”

“Why?” Abe asked.

“For fear somebody will spoil it with another hog story.  I’m a little afraid of anything I can say.  I would venture this, that the man Webster is a prophet.  In his Plymouth address he hears receding into never returning distance the clank of chains and all the horrid din of slavery.  It will come true.”

“Do you think so?” Abe asked.

“Surely—­there are so many of us who hate it.  These Yankees hate it and they and their children are scattering all over the midlands.  Their spirit will guide the West.  The love of Liberty is the salt of their blood and the marrow of their bones.  Liberty means freedom for all.  Wait until these babies, coming out here by the wagon load, have grown to manhood.  Slavery will have to reckon with them.”

“I hate it too,” said Abe.  “Down the Mississippi I have seen men and women sold like oxen.  If I live I’m going to hit that thing on the head some day.”

“Do you still want to be a lawyer?” Kelso asked.

“Yes, but sometimes I think I’d make a better blacksmith,” said Abe.

“I believe you’d do better with the hammer of argument.”

“If I had the education likely I would.  I’m trying to make up my mind what’s best for me.”