who welcomed the jest and the excuse for stopping work.  The achievement of the self-taught man remains wonderful, but, if he surmounts his difficulties at all, some of his limitations may turn to sheer advantage.  There is some advantage merely in being driven to make the most of few books; great advantage in having one’s choice restricted by circumstances to good books; great advantage too in the consciousness of untrained faculty which leaves a man capable in mature life of deliberately undertaking mental discipline.

Along with the legends and authentic records of his self-training, signs of an ambition which showed itself early and which was from the first a clean and a high ambition, there are also other legends showing Lincoln as a naughty boy among naughty boys.  The selection here made from these lacks refinement, and the reader must note that this was literally a big, naughty boy, not a man who had grown stiff in coarseness and ill-nature.  First it must be recalled that Abraham bore a grudge against the Grigsbys, an honourable grudge in its origin and perhaps the only grudge he ever bore.  There had arisen from this a combat, of which the details might displease the fastidious, but which was noble in so far that Abraham rescued a weaker combatant who was over-matched.  But there ensued something more displeasing, a series of lampoons by Abraham, in prose and a kind of verse.  These were gross and silly enough, though probably to the taste of the public which he then addressed, but it is the sequel that matters.  In a work called “The First Chronicles of Reuben,” it is related how Reuben and Josiah, the sons of Reuben Grigsby the elder, took to themselves wives on the same day.  By local custom the bridal feast took place and the two young couples began their married careers under the roof of the bridegrooms’ father.  Moreover, it was the custom that, at a certain stage in the celebrations, the brides should be escorted to their chambers by hired attendants who shortly after conducted the bridegrooms thither.  On this occasion some sense of mischief afoot disturbed the heart of Mrs. Reuben Grigsby the elder, and, hastening upstairs, just after the attendants had returned, she cried out in a loud voice and to the great consternation of all concerned, “Why, Reuben, you’re in bed with the wrong wife!” The historian who, to the manifest annoyance of Lincoln’s other biographers, has preserved this and much other priceless information, infers that Abraham, who was not invited to the feast, had plotted this domestic catastrophe and won over the attendants to his evil purpose.  This is not a certain inference, nor is it absolutely beyond doubt that the event recorded in “The First Chronicles of Reuben” ever happened at all.  What is certain is that these Chronicles themselves, composed in what purports to be the style of Scripture, were circulated for the joint edification of the proud race of Grigsby and of their envious neighbours in the handwriting of Abraham Lincoln, then between seventeen and eighteen.  Not without reason does an earlier manuscript of the same author conclude, after several correct exercises in compound subtraction, with the distich:—­