While Abraham Lincoln was trading to New Orleans his father, Thomas Lincoln, was on the move again. This time he migrated to Illinois, and there again shifted from place to place, gathering no moss, till he died as thriftless and poor as he had lived. We have, in later years, an application from him to his son for money, to which the son responds in a tone which implies some doubt as to the strict accuracy of the ground on which the old gentleman's request was preferred. Their relations were evidently not very affectionate, though there is nothing unfilial in Abe's conduct. Abraham himself drifted to Salem on the Sangamon, in Illinois, twenty miles north-west of Springfield, where he became clerk in a new store, set up by Denton Offutt, with whom he had formed a connection in one of his trips to New Orleans. Salem was then a village of a dozen houses, and the little centre of a society very like that of Pigeon Creek and its neighbourhood, but more decidedly western. We are told that "here Mr. Lincoln became acquainted with a class of men the world never saw the like of before or since. They were large men,--large in body and large in mind; hard to whip and never to be fooled. They were a bold, daring and reckless set of men; they were men of their own mind,--believed what was demonstrable, were men of great common sense. With these men Mr. Lincoln was thrown; with them he lived and with them he moved and almost had his being. They were sceptics all--scoffers some. These scoffers were good men, and their scoffs were protests against theology,--loud protests against the follies of Christianity; they had never heard of theism and the new and better religious thoughts of this age. Hence, being natural sceptics and being bold, brave men they uttered their thoughts freely.... They were on all occasions, when opportunity offered, debating the various questions of Christianity among themselves; they took their stand on common sense and on their own souls; and though their arguments were rude and rough, no man could overthrow their homely logic. They riddled all divines, and not unfrequently made them sceptics,--disbelievers as bad as themselves. They were a jovial, healthful, generous, true and manly set of people." It is evident that W. Herndon, the speaker, is himself a disbeliever in Christianity, and addicted to the "newer and better thought of this age." He gives one specimen, which we have omitted for fear of shocking our readers, of the theological criticism of these redoubtable logicians of nature; and we are inclined to infer from it that the divines whom they "riddled" and converted to scepticism must have been children of nature as well as themselves. The passage, however, is a life-like, though idealized, portrait of the Western man; and the tendency to religious scepticism of the most daring kind is as truly ascribed to him as the rest.