as I understood _demonstration_ to be. I consulted all the dictionaries
and books of reference I could find, but with no better results. You
might as well have defined _blue_ to a blind man. At last I
said,--Lincoln, you never can make a lawyer if you do not understand
what _demonstrate_ means; and I left my situation in Springfield, went
home to my father's house, and stayed there till I could give any
proposition in the six books of Euclid at sight. I then found out what
_demonstrate_ means, and went back to my law studies."

Was there ever a more thorough student?

* * * * *

He, like every one else, had his library within the library. Though he
read everything he could lay his hands on, yet there are five books to
be mentioned specifically, because from childhood they furnished his
intellectual nutriment. These were the Bible, Aesop's Fables and
Pilgrim's Progress, Burns, and Shakespeare. These were his mental
food. They entered into the very substance of his thought and
imagination. "Fear the man of one book." Lincoln had five books, and
so thoroughly were they his that he was truly formidable. These did
not exclude other reading and study; they made it a thousand times
more fruitful. And yet people ask, where did Lincoln get the majesty,
the classic simplicity and elegance of his Gettysburg address? The
answer is here.

While Lincoln was postmaster, he was a diligent reader of the
newspapers, of which the chief was the Louisville _Journal_. It was
edited by George D. Prentice, who was, and is, second to no other
editor in the entire history of American journalism. The ability of