learned the surveyor’s business.  He continued at this work till he was able to start as a lawyer, and there is evidence that his surveys of property were done with extreme accuracy.  Soon he further obtained the local Postmastership.  This, the only position except the Presidency itself which he ever held in the Federal Government, was not onerous, for the mails were infrequent; he “carried the office around in his hat”; we are glad to be told that “his administration gave satisfaction.”  Once calamity threatened him; a creditor distrained on the horse and the instruments necessary to his surveyorship; but Lincoln was reputed to be a helpful fellow, and friends were ready to help him; they bought the horse and instruments back for him.  To this time belongs his first acquaintance with some writers of unsettling tendency, Tom Paine, Voltaire, and Volney, who was then recognised as one of the dangerous authors.  Cock-fights, strange feats of strength, or of usefulness with axe or hammer or scythe, and a passion for mimicry continue.  In 1834 he became a candidate again.  “Can’t the party raise any better material than that?” asked a bystander before a speech of his; after it, he exclaimed that the speaker knew more than all the other candidates put together.  This time he was elected, being then twenty-five, and thereafter he was returned for three further terms of two years.  Shortly before his second election in 1836 the State capital was removed to Springfield, in his own county.  There in 1837 Lincoln fixed his home.  He had long been reading law in his curious, spasmodically concentrated way, and he had practised a little as a “pettifogger,” that is, an unlicensed practitioner in the inferior courts.  He had now obtained his license and was very shortly taken into partnership by an old friend in Springfield.

2. In the Illinois Legislature.

Here his youth may be said to end.  Springfield was a different place from New Salem.  There were carriages in it, and ladles who studied poetry and the fashions.  There were families from Virginia and Kentucky who were conscious of ancestry, while graver, possibly more pushing, people from the North-eastern States, soon to outnumber them, were a little inclined to ridicule what they called their “illusory ascendency.”  There was a brisk competition of churches, and mutual improvement societies such as the “Young Men’s Lyceum” had a rival claim to attention with races and cock-fights.

And it was an altered Abraham Lincoln that came to inhabit Springfield.  Arriving a day or two before his first law partnership was settled he came into the shop of a thriving young tradesman, Mr. Joshua Speed, to ask about the price of the cheapest bedding and other necessary articles.  The sum for which Lincoln, who had not one cent, would have had to ask, and would have been readily allowed, credit, was only seventeen dollars.  But this huge prospect of debt so visibly depressed him that Speed instantly