“Abraham Lincoln, his hand and pen,
  He will be good, but God knows when.”

Not to be too solemn about a tale which has here been told for the whimsical fancy of its unseemliness and because it is probably the worst that there is to tell, we may here look forward and face the well-known fact that the unseemliness in talk of rough, rustic boys flavoured the great President’s conversation through life.  It is well to be plain about this.  Lincoln was quite without any elegant and sentimental dissoluteness, such as can be attractively portrayed.  His life was austere and seems to have been so from the start.  He had that shy reverence for womanhood which is sometimes acquired as easily in rough as in polished surroundings and often quite as steadily maintained.  The testimony of his early companions, along with some fragments of the boy’s feeble but sincere attempts at verse, shows that he acquired it young.  But a large part of the stories and pithy sayings for which he was famous wherever he went, but of which when their setting is lost it is impossible to recover the enjoyment, were undeniably coarse, and naturally enough this fact was jarring to some of those in America who most revered him.  It should not really be hard, in any comprehensive view of his character and the circumstances in which it unfolded itself, to trace in this bent of his humour something not discordant with the widening sympathy and deepening tenderness of his nature.  The words of his political associate in Illinois, Mr. Leonard Swett, afterwards Attorney-General of the United States, may suffice.  He writes:  “Almost any man, who will tell a very vulgar story, has, in a degree, a vulgar mind.  But it was not so with him; with all his purity of character and exalted morality and sensibility, which no man can doubt, when hunting for wit he had no ability to discriminate between the vulgar and refined substances from which he extracted it.  It was the wit he was after, the pure jewel, and he would pick it up out of the mud or dirt just as readily as from a parlour table.”  In any case his best remembered utterances of this order, when least fit for print, were both wise and incomparably witty, and in any case they did not prevent grave gentlemen, who marvelled at them rather uncomfortably, from receiving the deep impression of what they called his pure-mindedness.

One last recollection of Lincoln’s boyhood has appealed, beyond any other, to some of his friends as prophetic of things to come.  Mention has already been made of his two long trips down the Mississippi.  With the novel responsibilities which they threw on him, and the novel sights and company which he met all the way to the strange, distant city of New Orleans, they must have been great experiences.  Only two incidents of them are recorded.  In the first voyage he and his mates had been disturbed at night by a band of negro marauders and had had a sharp fight in repelling them, but in the second voyage