he chose. He sought Mentor Graham, the schoolmaster,
and asked his advice. "If you are going before the public," Mr. Graham
told him, "you ought to do it." But where could he get a grammar?
There was but one, said Mr. Graham, in the neighborhood, and that was
six miles away. Without waiting further information the young man rose
from the breakfast-table, walked immediately to the place, borrowed
this rare copy of Kirkham's Grammar, and before night was deep into
its mysteries. From that time on for weeks he gave every moment of his
leisure to mastering the contents of the book. Frequently he asked his
friend Greene to "hold the book" while he recited, and, when puzzled
by a point, he would consult Mr. Graham.

Lincoln's eagerness to learn was such that the whole neighborhood
became interested. The Greenes lent him books, the schoolmaster kept
him in mind and helped him as he could, and even the village cooper
let him come into his shop and keep up a fire of shavings sufficiently
bright to read by at night. It was not long before the grammar was
mastered. "Well," Lincoln said to his fellow-clerk, Greene, "if that's
what they call a science, I think I'll go at another." He had made
another discovery--that he could conquer subjects.

[Illustration: SITE OF DENTON OFFUTT'S STORE.

From a photograph taken for this Magazine.

The building in which Lincoln clerked for Denton Offutt was standing
as late as 1836, and presumably stood until it rotted down. A slight
depression in the earth, evidently once a cellar, is all that remains
of Offutt's store. Out of this hole in the ground have grown three
trees, a locust, an elm, and a sycamore, seeming to spring from the
same roots, and curiously twined together; and high up on the sycamore
some genius has chiselled the face of Lincoln.]

Before the winter was ended he had become the most popular man in New
Salem. Although in February, 1832, he was but twenty-two years of age,
had never been at school an entire year in his life, had never made a
speech except in debating clubs and by the roadside, had read only the
books he could pick up, and known only the men who made up the poor,
out-of-the-way towns in which he had lived, "encouraged by his great
popularity among his immediate neighbors," as he says himself, he
decided to announce himself, in March, 1832, as a candidate for the
General Assembly of the State.

[Illustration: ZACHARY TAYLOR.

At the breaking out of the Black