red more than any one knew from ill concealed ridicule, but he had
been able to bear it with composure in his callow youth. Later nothing
roused his anger like an attempt to ridicule him. No man who came in his
way in after life was so quickly and completely floored as one George
Forquer, who, in a moment of folly, had attempted to make light of him.

Two women he had regarded with great tenderness--his foster mother, the
second wife of Thomas Lincoln, and Ann Rutledge. Others had been to him,
mostly, delightful but inscrutable beings. The company of women and of
dollars had been equally unfamiliar to him. He had said more than once in
his young manhood that he felt embarrassed in the presence of either, and
knew not quite how to behave himself--an exaggeration in which there was
no small amount of truth.

In 1836 the middle frontier had entered upon a singular phase of its
development. Emigrants from the East and South and from overseas had been
pouring into it. The summer before the lake and river steamers had been
crowded with them, and their wagons had come in long processions out of
the East Chicago had begun its phenomenal growth. A frenzied speculation
in town lots had been under way in that community since the autumn of
'35. It was spreading through the state. Imaginary cities were laid out
or the lonely prairies and all the corner lots sold to eager buyers and
paid for with promises. Fortunes of imaginary wealth were created by
sales of future greatness. Millions of conversational, promissory
dollars, based upon the gold at the foot of the rainbow, were changing
hands day by day. The Legislature, with an empty treasury behind it,
voted twelve millions for river improvements and imaginary railroads and
canals, for which neither surveys nor estimates had been made, to serve
the dream-built cities of the speculator. If Mr. Lincoln had had more
experience in the getting and use of dollars and more acquaintance with
the shrinking timidity of large sums, he would have tried to dissipate
these illusions of grandeur. But he went with the crowd, every member of
which had a like inexperience.

In the midst of the session Samson Traylor arrived in Vandalia on his
visit to Mr. Lincoln.

"I have sold my farm," said Samson to his old friend the evening of his
arrival.

"Did you get a good price?" Mr. Lincoln asked.

"All that my conscience would allow me to take," said Samson. "The man
offered me three dollars an acre