Lincoln is described, about this time, by Harvey Ross, who carried the mail over the star-route of central Illinois, as having a summer suit of brown nankeen, with a white waistcoat sprigged with coloured flowers. The wide, soft collar of his white shirt rolled back over a neck-cloth made of a black silk, fringed handkerchief. His hat was of brown buckeye splints, the pioneer’s substitute for straw. It was in this fashion he must have appeared as he walked back along the river and across the fields when he went to urge his love for Ann Rutledge. In old patch-work quilts, cherished as the work of our great-grandmothers, we may see to-day bits of cotton print--white with coloured pin-dots, indigo blue and oil red, and violet and pink grounds powdered with tiny, conventional figures and flowers in white. They remind us of old-fashioned gardens of perennials where lilacs, damask roses, and flowering almonds bloomed. A young girl like Ann would have one such pink gown to wear on warm evenings; and a quilted and ruffled sun-bonnet of sheer muslin, not to wear seriously, but to hang distractingly by the strings around her white neck. There was little self-consciousness about her, and no coquetry at all. Ann never teased; she was just simple and sincere and sweet. But it would be instinctive with her to pick up the grammar as an excuse for the stroll along the bluff with her lover. Of an oak or a maple, no matter how dense the foliage, one has a distinct image of the individual leaf; but of the sycamore--the American plane-tree--you may see thousands, and carry away only an impression of a silvery column and an enormous dome of green gossamer--a diaphanous mesh of vernal lace, whose pattern dissolves momently in the sun, and frays and ravels in the wind. When they came to where the sycamore was weaving its old faery weft in the sunset light, she laid the bonnet on the grass, and listened to his stories and comments on the new men and things he had seen, until he made her laugh, almost like the happy girl of old tavern days; for Lincoln was a wizard who could break the spell of bad dreams and revive dead faiths. A pause, a flutter of hearts as light as the leaf-shadows, and a hasty question to cover the embarrassment. There was a puzzling point in her grammar lesson--how _can_ adverbs modify other adverbs? Illustration: Photograph by C. U. Williams, Bloomington, Ill. _The top of the hill, New Salem, Illinois._ _The honey locust and sycamore, growing together from a slight depression that marks the site of Denton Offutt’s store, are known as the “Lincoln Trees.”_ Yes, he had been puzzled by that, too, and Mentor Graham had helped him with an illustration. I love you _very dearly_!