very early period the supremacy in goodness and cleverness of their
big brother Abraham. Mrs. Lincoln, not long before her death, gave
striking testimony of his winning and loyal character. She said to Mr.
Herndon: "I can say, what scarcely one mother in a thousand can say,
Abe never gave me a cross word or look, and never refused in fact or
appearance to do anything I asked him. His mind and mine--what little
I had--seemed to run together.... I had a son John, who was raised
with Abe. Both were good boys, but I must say, both now being dead,
that Abe was the best boy I ever saw or expect to see." Such were the
beginnings of this remarkable career, sacred as we see from childhood,
to duty and to human kindliness.

"We are making no claim of early saintship for him. He was merely a
good boy, with sufficient wickedness to prove his humanity. One of his
employers, undazzled by recent history, faithfully remembers that
young Abe liked his dinner and his pay better than his work: there is
surely nothing alien to ordinary mortality in this. It is also
reported that he sometimes impeded the celerity of harvest operations
by making burlesque speeches, or worse than that, comic sermons, from
the top of some tempting stump, to the delight of the hired hands and
the exasperation of the farmer. His budding talents as a writer were
not always used discreetly. He was too much given to scribbling coarse
satires and chronicles, in prose, and in something which had to him
and his friends the air of verse. From this arose occasional heart-
burnings and feuds, in which Abraham bore his part according to the
custom of the country. Despite his Quaker ancestry and his natural
love of peace, he was no non-resistant, and when he once entered upon
a quarrel the opponent usually had the worst of it. But he was
generous and placable, and some of his best friends were those with
whom he had had differences, and had settled them in the way then