lived. "After Ann died," said Mrs. Berry, "I remember that it was
common talk about how sad Lincoln was; and I remember myself how sad
he looked. They told me that every time he was in the neighborhood
after she died, he would go alone to her grave and sit there in
silence for hours."

In later life, when his sorrow had become a memory, he told a friend
who questioned him: "I really and truly loved the girl and think often
of her now." There was a pause, and then the President added:

"And I have loved the name of Rutledge to this day."


ABRAHAM LINCOLN AT TWENTY-SIX YEARS OF AGE.

When the death of Ann Rutledge came upon Lincoln, for a time
threatening to destroy his ambition and blast his life, he was in a
most encouraging position. Master of a profession in which he had an
abundance of work and earned fair wages, hopeful of being admitted
in a few months to the bar, a member of the State Assembly with every
reason to believe that, if he desired it, his constituency would
return him--few men are as far advanced at twenty-six as was Abraham
Lincoln.

Intellectually he was far better equipped than he believed himself to
be, better than he has ordinarily been credited with being. True,
he had had no conventional college training, but he had by his own
efforts attained the chief result of all preparatory study, the
ability to take hold of a subject and assimilate it. The fact that in
six weeks he had acquired enough of the science of surveying to enable