Several treasures came into possession of the junior member of the firm after Berry and Lincoln opened their store. Lincoln one day bought a barrel. What it contained he did not look to see. It was a good barrel. The man said it had a book or two down under the papers, and as he needed the few cents badly, the purchase price was paid and the barrel put aside. When some weeks later the contents was poured out Abe Lincoln discovered a treasure. He deserted his store long enough to run over to Rutledge's to make known his wonderful good luck. His homely face was bright with pleasure and his dull, gray eyes were shining as he held out a worn and stained copy of Blackstone. "Look! Look!" he cried, and in his joy he even tried to dance a jig. Another rich possession that came to him was a volume of poems containing one that he especially liked, the title of which was "Immortality." This poem Abe Lincoln wanted to read the Rutledges as they sat around the fire on an early fall evening. But Davy did not like the sound of the first verse and asked for a story of the killing of Abe Lincoln's grandfather by Indians. When this was told he wanted to hear about the voodoo fortune-teller in New Orleans and the slave-markets and the ships in the harbor. So Lincoln told these things while John Rutledge smoked and Mrs. Rutledge and Ann busied their fingers with their mending, meantime listening with as much interest as the children to their boarder's talk. After Davy's stories had been told it was Sonny's turn. "Tell about when you were a little boy," he urged; "that's what I want." Nothing could have been more acceptable to the entire family than this, for he had never said much about his own affairs. "The little boy you ask me to tell about," he said, "lived far away in a dense forest; wild cats screamed down the ravines; wolves howled across the clearin'; bears growled in the under-brush. The house this little boy lived in was not much better than the cave or the den of the animals. It was built of logs but had no floor, no windows, and no skin hung to the door. In a loft above the one room was a nest of leaves and into this he climbed at night on pegs driven into the wall. "Though he was very poor, this little boy was rich in one thing, and that was his mother. She toiled until her shoulders were stooped and thin, her face pale and her clear, gray eyes dim and sad, but she was never too tired to love her children, the boy and his little sister Sarah. She could read well and had brought into the wilderness three books: the Bible which she read daily, 'Pilgrim's Progress,' and Aesop's 'Fables.' Before the boy learned to read she told them stories from these books in the yellow light of a pine torch which burned upon the hearth, and the boy minded not the cry of wolves, nor wind, nor sleet, when he could hear these wonderful stories.