the work of years for him, in giving him the position he required in
the community where his lot was cast. He became from that moment, in a
certain sense, a personage, with a name and standing of his own. The
verdict of Clary's Grove was unanimous that he was "the cleverest
fellow that had ever broke into the settlement." He did not have to be
constantly scuffling to guard his self-respect, and at the same time
he gained the good-will of the better sort by his evident
peaceableness and integrity.

[Illustration: LEAF FROM ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S EXERCISE BOOK. The page
here shown in reduced fac-simile is from the Exercise Book presented
by William H. Herndon to the Keyes-Lincoln Memorial Collection. When
the book was written Lincoln was about seventeen.]

He made on the whole a satisfactory clerk for Mr. Offutt, though his
downright honesty must have seemed occasionally as eccentric in that
position as afterwards it did to his associates at the bar. Dr.
Holland has preserved one or two incidents of this kind, which have
their value. Once, after he had sold a woman a little bill of goods
and received the money, he found on looking over the account again
that she had given him six and a quarter cents too much. The money
burned in his hands until he locked the shop and started on a walk of
several miles in the night to make restitution before he slept. On
another occasion, after weighing and delivering a pound of tea, he
found a small weight on the scales. He immediately weighed out the
quantity of tea of which he had innocently defrauded his customer and
went in search of her, his sensitive conscience not permitting any
delay. To show that the young merchant was not too good for this
world, the same writer gives an incident of his shop-keeping
experience of a different character. A rural bully having made himself