m; but Berry drank and neglected the business. Lincoln was
strictly temperate, but he spent all his spare moments studying
Blackstone, a copy of which legal classic he had fortunately found in a
barrel of rubbish he had obligingly bought from a poor fellow in
trouble.

With both members of the firm thus preoccupied the business "winked
out." Berry died, leaving Lincoln the debts of the firm, twelve hundred
dollars,--to him an appalling sum, which he humorously called "the
national debt"; and on which he continued to make payments when he could
for the next fifteen years. For a time he was postmaster of New Salem,
an office so small that Andrew Jackson must have overlooked it. But the
experience shows how scrupulous he always was; for when years afterward
a government agent came to Springfield to make settlement Lincoln drew
forth the very coins that he had collected in the postoffice, and though
he had sorely needed the loan of them he had never even borrowed them
for temporary use.

For a time he had a better position as Deputy Surveyor of Sangamon
County. His work was accurate and he was doing well when in 1834 he
again announced as a candidate for the legislature and was elected.

At Vandalia at the session of the legislature he first saw Stephen A.
Douglas, then a lobbyist, and said of him, "He is the least man I ever
saw." Lincoln at this session seemed to be learning, studying men and
methods and prudently preparing for future success rather than
endeavoring to seize opportunities prematurely.

This is the time when Lincoln fell in love with Ann Rutledge, a
beautiful young woman of New Salem who was already betrothed to another.
The other lover went East and did not return. Lincoln had hopes, but Ann
took sick and died of brain fever. He was allowed to see her as she lay
near the end, and the effect upon his kindly nature was terrible. There
settled upon him a deep despondency. That fall and winter he wandered
alone in the woods along the Sangamon, almost distracted with sorrow.
When he seemed on the verge of insanity a friend, Bowling Green, took
him to his own home and nursed him back to health, and the grief
settled into that temperamental melancholy, which, relieved only by his
humor, was part of the deep mystic there was in him, part of the
prophet, the sadness that so early baptised him in the tragedy of life,
and taught him to pity a suffering world.

Again he ran for the legislature, announcing his po