Just when Lincoln became a conscious politician no man can say. His endless anecdotes and jokes, his winning honesty and good nature, his readiness to accept or stop a fight, his willingness to do a good turn for man, woman or child, and his open scorn for meanness, cruelty or deceit, were the simple overflowings of his natural character. He was coarse in his speech and manners. But behind the joking and buffoonery, the primitive man in him was true, gentle, chivalrous. His tender-heartedness was real. His kindliness was not merely the result of a desire to catch friends. He once illustrated himself by quoting an old man at an Indiana church meeting: “When I do good I feel good, when I do bad I feel bad, and that’s my religion.” But in New Salem it soon became evident that Lincoln was not satisfied to remain a clerk in a general store, and that the strivings of leadership were in him. He borrowed books. He asked Menton Graham, the schoolmaster, for advice. He read, read, read. He walked many miles at night to speak in debating clubs. He trudged twelve miles to get Kirkham’s Grammar, and often asked his assistant in the store to keep watch with the book while he said the lesson. It was a common thing to find him stretched out on the counter, head on a roll of calicos, grammar in hand. His desire to master language became a passion. The whole village “took notice.” Even the cooper would keep a fire of shavings going at night that Lincoln might read. The young frontiersman of six-feet-four, who could outlift, outwrestle and outrun any man in Sagamon County, rising from an almost hopeless abyss of ignorance and poverty, was, by his own resolute efforts, acquiring the power that made him the hero of civilization and the savior of a race. [Illustration: From “Abraham Lincoln.” Copyright, 1892, D. Appleton & Co. The Globe Tavern, Springfield, where Lincoln lived] How many of the almost seventeen million children who receive free education in the public schools in the United States, and who assemble once a year to repeat the imperishable sayings of Lincoln, realize how he had to strain and struggle for the knowledge which is offered daily to them as a gift? No wonder that Lincoln became popular in New Salem, and that when the little Black Hawk Indian war broke out he was elected captain of the company which marched forth from the village in April, 1831, in buckskin breeches and coon caps, with rifles, powder horns and blankets. It was in that picturesque campaign that Lincoln, coming with his company to a fence gate and not remembering the military word of command necessary to get his company in order through such a narrow space, instantly showed his ingenuity by shouting, “This company is dismissed for two minutes, when it will fall in again on the other side of the gate.”