consideration among the lads of his age and company. The manners of
the people then settling in Indiana and Illinois had not the extreme
ferocity for which Kentucky had earlier been famous, and which crops up
here and there in frontier life elsewhere. All the same, as might
naturally be supposed, they shared Plato's opinion that youths and men
in the prime of life should settle their differences with their fists.
Young Lincoln's few serious combats were satisfactorily decisive, and
neither they nor his friendly wrestling bouts ended in the quarrels
which were too common among his neighbours. Thus, for all his
originality and oddity, he early grew accustomed to mix in the sort of
company he was likely to meet, without either inward shrinking or the
need of conscious self-assertion.

In one thing he stood aloof from the sports of his fellows. Most
backwoodsmen were bred to the gun; he has told us that he shot a turkey
when he was eight and never afterwards shot at all. There is an early
tale of his protests against an aimless slaughter of mud turtles; and
it may be guessed that the dislike of all killing, which gave him sore
trouble later, began when he was young. Tales survive of his kindness
to helpless men and animals. It marks the real hardness of his
surroundings, and their hardening effect on many, that his exertions in
saving a drunken man from death in the snow are related with apparent
surprise. Some tales of his helping a pig stuck in a bog or a dog on
an ice floe and the like seem to indicate a curious and lasting trait.
These things seem not to have been done spontaneously, but on mature
reflection after he had passed unheeding by. He grew to be a man of
prompt action in circumstances of certain kinds; but generally his
impulse was slow and not very sure. Taste and the minor sensibilities
were a little deficient in him. As a lady once candidly explained to
him, he was not ready with little gracious acts. But rare occasions,