The lonely girl could not but be cheered by these letters and have her outlook on life enlarged by them, so that her own experience dwindled somewhat in the perspective. She wrote to him--girlish, grateful letters--saying nothing of McNamar, and showing how pathetically she leaned on him. On his homeward ride in the sweet spring weather his mind dwelt on her with a tenderness no longer forbidden, no longer hopeless of its reward. Squire Green’s farm lay to the north of New Salem, so that, on this day of his return, he must have avoided the village, its clamorous welcome, its jesting surmises. In fancy he could imagine that lovable vagabond, Jack Kelso, fishing from the pier below the dam, catching sight of him out of the tail of a mischievous Irish eye, and announcing his arrival with a tender stanza from “Annie Laurie.” The sympathy of town and country-side was with him in his wooing, and it warmed his heart; but to-day was sacred to love. He turned from the road into the ravine toward the big cabin of hewn logs that nestled under the brow of the bluff. We know that a grove of forest trees surrounded it and a young apple orchard, in blossom in April, concealed it from the highway and river. If it was after the noon hour the men would have gone back to their ploughing, and Aunt Nancy Green, in a gown of lilac print, be sitting with her patchwork in the orchard, where she could smell the bloom, keep an eye on strolling, downy broods, and watch the honey-bees fill her hives. The Squire was there, too, very likely, tilted back in his wide chair of hickory splints, asleep. He was a well-to-do man, and as he weighed two hundred and fifty pounds he took life easy, and was never far away from the slender shadow cast by busy “mother.” Illustration: Photograph by C. U. Williams, Bloomington, Ill. _Lincoln’s Old Home._ _Squire Bowling Green’s Cabin, near New Salem, Illinois, as it appears to-day._ _Lincoln lived here from 1834 to 1837. It was in this cabin that he mourned the death of Ann Rutledge._ “Yes, Bill was some’ers ’round,” but lively Aunt Nancy ventured an affectionate joke, saying she “reckoned Abe wasn’t pinin’ to see Bill as much as he was someone else.” She was willing to get his dinner in the middle of the afternoon, but he had to pay for it with his best new stories. A visit with Aunt Nancy, his books arranged on the shelf he had built above his table in the chimney corner, a swim in a warm shallow pool in the Sangamon, then up the ladder-like stair to the loft chamber he often shared with the friend of his youth, to dress for Ann!