The beautiful girl sat there in the firelight, knitting lace or sewing, her skilful fingers never idle; but smiling, listening to the talk, making a bright comment now and then, wearing somehow, in her busiest hour, an air of leisure, with all the time in the world for others, as a lady should. In the country parlance Ann was always spoken of as “good company.” Sweet-natured and helpful, the boys could always go to her with their lessons, or the little sisters with a dropped stitch or tangled thread. With the latest baby, she was a virginal madonna. Lincoln attended the fire, held Mrs. Rutledge’s yarn, rocked the cradle, and told his inimitable stories. When he had mastered Kirkham’s Grammar he began to teach Ann the mysteries of parsing and analysis. After the school debate one night a year before, Mentor Graham, one of those scholarly pedagogues who leavened the West with learning, had thrilled him with ambition by telling him he had a gift for public speaking, but that he needed to correct many inaccuracies and crudities of speech. Text books were scarce, but he knew of a grammar owned by a farmer who lived seven miles in the country. Lincoln got up at daylight, filled his pockets with corn dodgers, and went for that grammar. He must have bought it, paying for it in work, for he afterward gave it to Ann--his single gift to her, or at least the only one that is preserved. Her brother Robert’s descendants have to-day this little old text-book, inscribed on the title-page in Lincoln’s handwriting: _Ann M. Rutledge is now learning grammar._ Illustration: _The grammar which Lincoln studied as a young man._ _It is said that Lincoln learned this grammar by heart, and it is the only gift which he is known to have given to Ann Rutledge._ How eloquent that battered, faded, yellow-leafed little old grammar is of the ambitions and attainments that set these two apart from the unrecorded lives in that backwoods community! Ann was betrothed, and her content and trust in her lover were something beautiful to see, but McNeill’s figure is vague. There is no description of him, few facts about him are remembered, except that he had prospered and won Ann Rutledge’s love. In the stories of the region, that have now taken on the legendary haze of cherished romance, Lincoln is the hero, long before he appears in the character of chivalrous suitor. Oh, those long, intimate evenings! Twenty people were in the big, fire-lit family room, perhaps, storm outside and flames roaring merrily in the chimney. But they two, with a special candle on Ann’s little sewing-table, were outside the circle of murmurous talk and laughter, the pale gold head and the raven one close together over the hard-and-fast rules of the text book! Lincoln loved her then, unconsciously, must have loved her from the first, but he was incapable of a dishonourable thought, and Ann’s heart was all McNeill’s.