Some of you who read these pages had grandfathers or great-grandfathers who fought in this war. Some of these fought for the South; some fought for the North. Some of them may have died for the South; some of them may have died for the North. The President of the United States at this time was a man named Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was a very poor boy who had been born in a log cabin. He had taught himself to read by the light of a blazing knot of wood at night after his day’s work was done. As he was very poor, he had only a few books, and these he read over and over again. One of these books was the same “Æsop’s Fables” that you read. When Lincoln was a young man, he became a storekeeper. One day he found that he had given a poor woman a smaller package of tea than she had paid for, and so he closed the store and walked many miles to her house in order to return the change. People began to call him Honest Abe after that, for he was always very honest and kind-hearted. [Illustration: Lincoln visiting camp and shaking hands with the soldiers.] He studied hard and became a lawyer and at last was elected President of the United States. One day while he was in a theater watching a play he was shot and killed by one of the actors who thought Lincoln had not done right in freeing the slaves. Lincoln was one of our greatest Presidents. Washington started our country; Lincoln prevented its splitting into two parts, and kept it together as one big united land to grow into the great country it now is. 76 Three New Postage-Stamps We are getting pretty close to the present time, to “Now.” Let us look backward a minute to see what had been going on in Europe since the time of Napoleon. After Napoleon had been sent to Elba, the French had to have another ruler. They wanted their old kings back again. The family name of their old kings was Bourbon. So the French thought they ought to have a Bourbon ruler over them. Accordingly they tried out three Bourbons one after the other, all relatives of their last king, whom they had beheaded. But all of them proved no good, the French people had given the Bourbon family a good tryout, and so at last they stopped worrying with kings and started another republic. Now, a republic has a president instead of a king, so that the people had to choose a president; and whom do you suppose they picked out? Why, the nephew of Napoleon. The nephew of Napoleon was named Louis Napoleon. He had planned and plotted again and again to make himself king of France, but again and again he had failed. And now he was elected president! But Louis Napoleon didn’t want to be _only_ president. He wanted to be like his uncle the great Napoleon. He dreamed of being emperor and conquering Europe, and so it was not long after this before he had himself made emperor, and he called himself Napoleon III.[5]