In the spring of this year, 1833, he was appointed Postmaster of New
Salem, and held the office for three years. Its emoluments were
slender and its duties light, but there was in all probability no
citizen of the village who could have made so much of it as he. The
mails were so scanty that he was said to carry them in his hat, and he
is also reported to have read every newspaper that arrived; it is
altogether likely that this formed the leading inducement to his
taking the office. His incumbency lasted until New Salem ceased to be
populous enough for a post-station and the mail went by to Petersburg.
Dr. J. G. Holland relates a sequel to this official experience which
illustrates the quaint honesty of the man. Several years later, when
he was a practicing lawyer, an agent of the Post-office Department
called upon him, and asked for a balance due from the New Salem
office, some seventeen dollars. Lincoln rose, and opening a little
trunk which lay in a corner of the room, took from it a cotton rag in
which was tied up the exact sum required. "I never use any man's money
but my own," he quietly remarked. When we consider the pinching
poverty in which these years had been passed, we may appreciate the
self-denial denial which had kept him from making even a temporary use
of this little sum of government money.

[Illustration: A. LINCOLN'S SURVEYING INSTRUMENTS AND SADDLE-BAG. IN
THE POSSESSION OF THE LINCOLN MONUMENT COLLECTION.]

John Calhoun, the Surveyor of Sangamon County, was at this time
overburdened with work. The principal local industry was speculation
in land. Every settler of course wanted his farm surveyed and marked
out for him, and every community had its syndicate of leading citizens
who cherished a scheme of laying out a city somewhere. In many cases
the city was plotted, the sites of the principal buildings, including