“Trouble was later to keep things balanced. The older he grew, the more he read, and he begun to run up against a kind of thinkin’ along about the time he was twenty-one or twenty-two that was a good deal different from that he’d been used to, books that made out the Bible wa’n’t so, that even said there wa’n’t any God. We all took a turn at readin’ Tom Paine and Voltaire out here, and there was another book--somebody’s ‘Ruins’--I forget the name.” “Volney?” “Yes, that’s it. Volney’s Ruins.” “Do you know I think that book took an awful grip on Mr. Lincoln. I reckon it was the first time he had ever realized how long the world’s been runnin’; how many lots of men have lived and settled countries and built cities and how time and time again they’ve all been wiped out. Mr. Lincoln couldn’t get over that. I’ve heard him talk about how old the world was time and time again, how nothing lasted--men--cities--nations. One set on top of another--men comin’ along just as interested and busy as we are, in doin’ things, and then little by little all they done passin’ away. “He was always speculatin’ about that kind of thing. I remember in ’48 when he came back from Congress he stopped to see Niagara Falls. Well, sir, when he got home he couldn’t talk about anything else for days, seemed to knock politics clean out of his mind. He’d sit there that fall in that chair you’re in and talk and talk about it. Talk just like it’s printed in those books his secretary got up. I never cared myself for all those articles they wrote. Wrong, am I? Mebbe so, but there wa’n’t enough of Mr. Lincoln in ’em to suit me. I wanted to know what he said about everything in his own words. But I tell you when I saw the books with the things he had said and wrote all brought together nice and neat, and one after another, I just took to that. I’ve got ’em here in my desk, often read ’em and lots of it sounds just as natural, almost hear him sayin’ it, just as if he was settin’ here by the stove. “Now what he tells about Niagara in the book is like that--just as if he was here. I can hear him sayin’: ‘Why, Billy, when Columbus first landed here, when Christ suffered on the Cross, when Moses crossed dry-shod through the Red Sea, even when Adam was first made, Niagara was roarin’ away. He’d talk in here just as it is printed there; how the big beasts whose bones they’ve found in mounds must have seen the falls, how it’s older than them and older than the first race of men. They’re all dead and gone, not even bones of many of ’em left, and yet there’s Niagara boomin’ away fresh as ever. “He used to prove by the way the water had worn away the rocks that the world was at least fourteen thousand years old. A long spell, but folks tell me it ain’t nothin’ to what is bein’ estimated now.