As his sympathy went forth to others, it attracted others to him.  Especially those whom he called the “plain people” felt themselves drawn to him by the instinctive feeling that he understood, esteemed, and appreciated them.  He had grown up among the poor, the lowly, the ignorant.  He never ceased to remember the good souls he had met among them, and the many kindnesses they had done him.  Although in his mental development he had risen far above them, he never looked down upon them.  How they felt and how they reasoned he knew, for so he had once felt and reasoned himself.  How they could be moved he knew, for so he had once been moved himself and practised moving others.  His mind was much larger than theirs, but it thoroughly comprehended theirs; and while he thought much farther than they, their thoughts were ever present to him.  Nor had the visible distance between them grown as wide as his rise in the world would seem to have warranted.  Much of his backwoods speech and manners still clung to him.  Although he had become “Mr. Lincoln” to his later acquaintances, he was still “Abe” to the “Nats” and “Billys” and “Daves” of his youth; and their familiarity neither appeared unnatural to them, nor was it in the least awkward to him.  He still told and enjoyed stories similar to those he had told and enjoyed in the Indiana settlement and at New Salem.  His wants remained as modest as they had ever been; his domestic habits had by no means completely accommodated themselves to those of his more highborn wife; and though the “Kentucky jeans” apparel had long been dropped, his clothes of better material and better make would sit ill sorted on his gigantic limbs.  His cotton umbrella, without a handle, and tied together with a coarse string to keep it from flapping, which he carried on his circuit rides, is said to be remembered still by some of his surviving neighbors.  This rusticity of habit was utterly free from that affected contempt of refinement and comfort which self-made men sometimes carry into their more affluent circumstances.  To Abraham Lincoln it was entirely natural, and all those who came into contact with him knew it to be so.  In his ways of thinking and feeling he had become a gentleman in the highest sense, but the refining process had polished but little the outward form.  The plain people, therefore, still considered “honest Abe Lincoln” one of themselves; and when they felt, which they no doubt frequently did, that his thoughts and aspirations moved in a sphere above their own, they were all the more proud of him, without any diminution of fellow-feeling.  It was this relation of mutual sympathy and understanding between Lincoln and the plain people that gave him his peculiar power as a public man, and singularly fitted him, as we shall see, for that leadership which was preeminently required in the great crisis then coming on,—­the leadership which indeed thinks and moves ahead of the masses, but always remains within sight and sympathetic touch of them.