single out for glory the puzzled civil magistrate who sat by. Thus
when an English writer tells again this tale, which has been well told
already and in which there can remain no important new facts to
disclose, he must endeavour to make clear to Englishmen circumstances
and conditions which are familiar to Americans. He will incur the
certainty that here and there his own perspective of American affairs
and persons will be false, or his own touch unsympathetic. He had
better do this than chronicle sayings and doings which to him and to
those for whom he writes have no significance. Nor should the writer
shrink too timidly from the display of a partisanship which, on one
side or the other, it would be insensate not to feel. The true
obligation of impartiality is that he should conceal no fact which, in
his own mind, tells against his views.

Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth President of the United States of America,
was born on February 12, 1809, in a log cabin on a barren farm in the
backwoods of Kentucky, about three miles west of a place called
Hodgensville in what is now La Rue County.

Fifty years later when he had been nominated for the Presidency he was
asked for material for an account of his early life. "Why," he said,
"it is a great folly to attempt to make anything out of me or my early
life. It can all be condensed into a single sentence; and that
sentence you will find in Gray's 'Elegy':--

"'The short and simple annals of the poor.'

That's my life, and that's all you or anyone else can make out of it."
His other references to early days were rare. He would repeat queer
reminiscences of the backwoods to illustrate questions of state; but of