she had been. It is the old way that Nature
has of preparing the young to come out upon the stage of real life and to
act in its moving scenes. Abe manfully gave them his best wishes and when
he spoke of Ann it was done very tenderly. The look of sadness, which all
had noted in his moments of abstraction, deepened and often covered his
face with its veil. That is another way that Nature has of preparing the
young. For these the roses have fallen and only the thorns remain. They
are not lured; they seem to be driven to their tasks, but for all, soon
or late, her method changes.

On a beautiful morning of June, 1834, John McNeil left the village. Abe
Lincoln and Harry and Samson and Sarah and Jack Kelso and his wife stood
with the Rutledges in the dooryard of the tavern when he rode away. He
was going back to his home in the far East to return in the autumn and
make Ann his bride. The girl wept as if her heart would break when he
turned far down the road and waved his hand to her.

"Oh, my pretty lass! Do you not hear the birds singing in the meadows?"
said Jack Kelso. "Think of the happiness all around you and of the
greater happiness that is coming when he returns. Shame on you!"

"I'm afraid he'll never come back," Ann sobbed.

"Nonsense! Don't get a maggot in your brain and let the crows go walking
over your face. Come, we'll take a ride in the meadows and if I don't
bring you back laughing you may call me no prophet."

So the event passed.

Harry traveled about with Abe a good deal that summer, "electioneering,"
as they called it, from farm to farm. Samson and Sarah regarded the
association as a good school for the boy who had a taste for politics.
Abe used to go into the fields, with the men whose favor he sought, and
bend his long back over a scythe or a cradle and race them playfully
across the field of grain cutting a wider swath than any other and always
holding the lead. Every man was out of breath at the end of his swath and
needed a few minutes for recuperation. That gave Abe a chance for his
statement of the county's needs and his plan of satisfying them. He had
met and talked with a majority of the voters before the campaign ended in
his election in August. Those travels about the county had been a source
of education to the candidate and the voters.

At odd times that summer he had been surveying a new road with Harry
Needles for his helper. In September they resumed their work upon it in
the vicini