strictest economy. By means of pegs and other devices people managed to
get along without them.

When Abraham Lincoln went to New Salem it was (like all frontier towns)
a promising place. It grew until it had the enormous population of
about one hundred people, housed--or log-cabined--in fifteen primitive
structures. The tributary country was not very important in a
commercial sense. To this population no less than four general stores--
that is, stores containing nearly everything that would be needed in
that community--offered their wares.

The town flourished, at least it lived, about through the period that
Lincoln dwelt there, after which it disappeared.

Lincoln was ready to take any work that would get him a living. A
neighbor advised him to make use of his great strength in the work of a
blacksmith. He seriously thought of learning the trade, but was,
fortunately for the country, diverted from doing so.

The success of the expedition to New Orleans had won the admiration of
his employer, Denton Offutt, and he now offered Lincoln a clerkship in
his prospective store. The offer was accepted partly because it gave
him some time to read, and it was here that he came to know the two
great poets, Burns and Shakespeare.

Offutt's admiration of the young clerk did him credit, but his voluble
expression of it was not judicious. He bragged that Lincoln was smart
enough to be president, and that he could run faster, jump higher,
throw farther, and "wrastle" better than any man in the country. In the
neighborhood there was a gang of rowdies, kind at heart but very rough,