ce Begins Its
Sessions in the Rear of Joshua Speed's Store. Also at Samson's
Fireside Honest Abe Talks of the Authority of the Law and the
Right of Revolution, and Later Brings a Suit against Lionel Davis

XXII Wherein Abe Lincoln Reveals His Method of Conducting a Lawsuit in
the Case of Henry Brimstead et al. vs. Lionel Davis

XXIII Which Presents the Pleasant Comedy of Individualism in the New
Capital, and the Courtship of Lincoln and Mary Todd

XXIV Which Describes a Pleasant Holiday and a Pretty Stratagem

XXV Being a Brief Memoir by the Honorable and Venerable Man Known in
These Pages as Josiah Traylor, Who Saw the Great Procession of
Events between Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson and Especially
the Making and the End of Lincoln

A MAN FOR THE AGES

BOOK ONE

CHAPTER I

WHICH DESCRIBES THE JOURNEY OF SAMSON HENRY TRAYLOR AND HIS WIFE AND
THEIR TWO CHILDREN AND THEIR DOG SAMBO THROUGH THE ADIRONDACK WILDERNESS
IN 1831 ON THEIR WAY TO THE LAND OF PLENTY, AND ESPECIALLY THEIR
ADVENTURES IN BEAR VALLEY AND NO SANTA CLAUS LAND. FURTHERMORE, IT
DESCRIBES THE SOAPING OF THE BRIMSTEADS AND THE CAPTURE OF THE VEILED
BEAR.

In the early summer of 1831 Samson Traylor and his wife, Sarah, and two
children left their old home near the village of Vergennes, Vermont, and
began their travels toward the setting sun with four chairs, a bread
board and rolling-pin, a feather bed and blankets, a small looking-glass,
a skillet, an axe, a pack basket with a pad of sole leather on the same,
a water pail, a box of dishes, a tub of salt pork, a rifle, a teapot, a
sack of meal, sundry small provisions and a violin, in a double wagon
drawn by oxen. It is a pleasure to note that they had a violin and were
not disposed to part with it. The reader must not overlook its full
historic significance. The stern, uncompromising spirit of the Puritan
had left the house of the Yankee before a violin could enter it. Humor
and the love of play had preceded and cleared a way for it. Where there
was a fiddle there were cheerful hearts. A young black shepherd dog with
tawny points and the name of Sambo followed the wagon or explored the
fields and woods it passed.

If we had been at the Congregational Church on Sunday we might have heard
the minister saying to Samson, after the service, that it was hard to
understand why the happiest family in the parish and th