ed that in law and politics he would do just
right.

John Hanks had brought some of the rails that the candidate for the
presidency had split into the Convention of Illinois, and the rails that
represented the hardships of pioneer life became the oriflamme of the
leader from the prairies. He who is true to a nation is first true to
his parents and home.

That was an ever-to-be-remembered day when, in August, 1860, the people
of the great West with one accord arranged to visit Abraham Lincoln, the
candidate for the presidency, at Springfield, Illinois. Seventy
thousand strangers poured into the prairie city. They came from Indiana,
Iowa, and the lakes. Thousands came from Chicago. Men came in wagons,
bringing their wives and children. They brought tents, camp-kettles, and
coffee-pots. Says a graphic writer who saw the scene:

"Every road leading to the city is crowded for twenty miles with
vehicles. The weather is fine, and a little overwarm. Girls can dress in
white, and bare their arms and necks without danger; the women can bring
their children. Everything that was ever done at any other mass-meeting
is done here. Locomotive-builders are making a boiler; blacksmiths are
heating and hammering their irons; the iron-founders are molding their
patterns; the rail-splitters are showing the people how Uncle Abe used
to split rails; every other town has its wagon-load of thirty-one girls
in white to represent the States; bands of music, numerous almost as
those of McClellan on Arlington Heights in 1862, are playing; old men of
the War of 1812, with their old wives, their children, grandchildren,
and great-grandchildren, are here: making a procession of human beings,
horses, and carriages not less than ten miles in length. And yet the
procession might have left the town and the people would scarcely be
missed.

"There is an immense wigwam, with galleries like a theatre; but there
are people enough not in the procession to fill a dozen like it. Half an
hour is long enough to witness the moving panorama of men and women,
horses, carriages, representatives of trades, mottoes, and burlesques,
and listen to the bands."

And among those who came to see the great procession, the
rail-splitters, and the sights, were the Tunker from the Indian schools
over the Mississippi, and Aunt Indiana from Indiana.

There was a visitor from the East who became the hero of the great day.
He is living now (1891) in Chelsea, Mass., near the So