which he extracted it. It was the wit he was after, the pure jewel,
and he would pick it up out of the mud or dirt just as readily as from
a parlour table." In any case his best remembered utterances of this
order, when least fit for print, were both wise and incomparably witty,
and in any case they did not prevent grave gentlemen, who marvelled at
them rather uncomfortably, from receiving the deep impression of what
they called his pure-mindedness.

One last recollection of Lincoln's boyhood has appealed, beyond any
other, to some of his friends as prophetic of things to come. Mention
has already been made of his two long trips down the Mississippi. With
the novel responsibilities which they threw on him, and the novel
sights and company which he met all the way to the strange, distant
city of New Orleans, they must have been great experiences. Only two
incidents of them are recorded. In the first voyage he and his mates
had been disturbed at night by a band of negro marauders and had had a
sharp fight in repelling them, but in the second voyage he met with the
negro in a way that to him was more memorable. He and the young
fellows with him saw, among the sights of New Orleans, negroes chained,
maltreated, whipped and scourged; they came in their rambles upon a
slave auction where a fine mulatto girl was being pinched and prodded
and trotted up and down the room like a horse to show how she moved,
that "bidders might satisfy themselves," as the auctioneer said, of the
soundness of the article to be sold. John Johnston and John Hanks and
Abraham Lincoln saw these sights with the unsophisticated eyes of
honest country lads from a free State. In their home circle it seems
that slavery was always spoken of with horror. One of them had a
tenacious memory and a tenacious will. "Lincoln saw it," John Hanks
said long after, and other men's recollections of Lincoln's talk
confirmed him--"Lincoln saw it; his heart bled; said nothing much, was