al character, alone made these transactions possible, since
not a dollar of actual money changed hands during all this shifting
of ownership. In the long run the people's faith in him was fully
justified; but meantime he suffered years of worry and harassing debt.
Berry proved a worthless partner; the business a sorry failure.
Seeing this, Lincoln and Berry sold out, again on credit, to the Trent
brothers, who soon broke up the store and ran away. Berry also departed
and died; and in the end all the notes came back upon Lincoln for
payment. Of course he had not the money to meet these obligations. He
did the next best thing: he promised to pay as soon as he could, and
remaining where he was, worked hard at whatever he found to do. Most
of his creditors, knowing him to be a man of his word, patiently bided
their time, until, in the course of long years, he paid, with interest,
every cent of what he used to call, in rueful satire upon his own folly,
his "National Debt."

III. LAWYER LINCOLN

Unlucky as Lincoln's attempt at storekeeping had been, it served one
good purpose. Indeed, in a way it may be said to have determined his
whole future career. He had had a hard struggle to decide between
becoming a blacksmith or a lawyer; and when chance seemed to offer a
middle course, and he tried to be a merchant, the wish to study law had
certainly not faded from his mind.

There is a story that while cleaning up the store, he came upon a barrel
which contained, among a lot of forgotten rubbish, some stray volumes
of Blackstone's "Commentaries," and that this lucky find still further
quickened his interest in the law. Whether this tale be true or not it
seems certain that during the time the store was running its downward
course from bad to worse, he devoted a large part of his too abundant
leisure to reading and study of various kinds. People who knew him then
have told how he would lie for hours under a great oak-tree that grew
just outside the store door, poring over his book, and "grinding around
with the shade" as it shifted from north to east.

Lincoln's habit of reading was still further encouraged by his being
appointed postmaster of New Salem on May 7, 1833, an office he held for
about three years--until New Salem grew too small to have a post-office
of its own, and the mail was sent to a neighboring town. The office
was so insignificant that according to popular fable it had no fixed
abiding-place, Lincoln bein