“And he exhibits such a touching sympathy for the poor,” said Kelso, “you can’t help loving him.  I have never beheld such easy and admirable grandeur.”

The addition of liquors to its stock had attracted some rather tough characters to the store.  One of them who had driven some women out of it with profanity was collared by Abe and conducted out of the door and thrown upon the grass where his face was rubbed with smart weed until he yelled for mercy.  After that the rough type of drinking man chose his words with some care in the store of Berry and Lincoln.

One evening, of that summer, Abe came out to the Traylors’ with a letter in his hat for Sarah.

“How’s business?” Samson asked.

“Going to peter out I reckon,” Abe answered with a sorrowful look.  “It will leave me badly in debt.  I wanted something that would give me a chance for study and I got it.  By jing!  It looks as if I was going to have years of study trying to get over it.  I’ve gone and jumped into a mill pond to get out of the rain.  I’d better have gone to Harvard College and walked all the way.  Have you got any work to give me?  You know I can split rails about as fast as the next man and I’ll take my pay in wheat or corn.”

“You may give me all the time you can spend outside the store,” said Samson.

That evening they had a talk about the whisky business and its relation to the character of Eliphalet Biggs and to sundry infractions of law and order in their community.  Samson had declared that it was wrong to sell liquor.

“All that kind of thing can be safely left to the common sense of our people,” said Abe.  “The remedy is education, not revolution.  Slowly the people will have to set down all the items in the ledger of common sense that passes from sire to son.  By and by some generation will strike a balance.  That may not come in a hundred years.  Soon or late the majority of the people will reach a reckoning with John Barleycorn.  If there’s too much against him they will act.  You might as well try to stop a glacier by building a dam in front of it.  They have opened an account with Slavery too.  By and by they’ll decide its fate.”

Such was his faith in the common folk of America whose way of learning and whose love of the right he knew as no man has known it.

In this connection the New Englander wrote in his diary: 

* * * * *

“He has spent his boyhood in the South and his young manhood in the North.  He has studied the East and lived in the West.  He is the people—­I sometimes think—­and about as slow to make up his mind.  As Isaiah says:  ’He does not judge after the sight of his eyes neither reprove after the hearing of his ears.’  Abe has to think about it.”

* * * * *

Many days thereafter Abe and Harry and Samson were out in the woods together splitting rails and making firewood.  Abe always took his book with him and read aloud to Harry and Samson in the noon-hour.  He liked to read aloud and thought that he remembered better what he had read with both eye and ear taking it in.