apparently because he was kindly and ever ready to do odd jobs in
addition to his regular work. However, until 1835, his story is that of
a man's man, possibly because there was so much of the feminine in
his own make-up. In 1835 came a change. A girl of New Salem, a pretty
village maiden, the best the poor place could produce, revealed him to
himself. Sweet Ann Rutledge, the daughter of the tavern-keeper, was
his first love. But destiny was against them. A brief engagement was
terminated by her sudden death late in the summer of 1835. Of this
shadowy love-affair very little is known,--though much romantic fancy
has been woven about it. Its significance for after-time is in Lincoln's
"reaction." There had been much sickness in New Salem the summer in
which Ann died. Lincoln had given himself freely as nurse--the depth
of his companionableness thus being proved--and was in an overwrought
condition when his sorrow struck him. A last interview with the dying
girl, at which no one was present, left him quite unmanned. A period of
violent agitation followed. For a time he seemed completely transformed.
The sunny Lincoln, the delight of Clary's Grove, had vanished. In
his place was a desolated soul--a brother to dragons, in the terrible
imagery of Job--a dweller in the dark places of affliction. It was his
mother reborn in him. It was all the shadowiness of his mother's world;
all that frantic reveling in the mysteries of woe to which, hitherto,
her son had been an alien. To the simple minds of the villagers with
their hard-headed, practical way of keeping all things, especially love
and grief, in the outer layer of consciousness, this revelation of an
emotional terror was past understanding. Some of them, true to their
type, pronounced him insane. He was watched with especial vigilance
during storms, fogs, damp gloomy weather, "for fear of an accident."
Surely, it was only a crazy man, in New Salem psychology, who was heard
to say, "I can never be reconciled to have the snow, rains and storms
beat upon her grave."(10)