It is hard to realize that, even later in his career, and with all his mighty strength and courage, the man who preserved “government of the people, for the people, and by the people” to the world could earn only thirty-seven cents a day, and that he had “to split four hundred rails for every yard of brown jeans dyed with white walnut bark that would be necessary to make him a pair of trousers.” When he was President of the United States he told Secretary Seward the story of how he had once taken two men and their trunks to a river steamer in a flatboat built by his own hands, and got a dollar for it. “In these days it seems like a trifle to me,” he added, “but it was a most important incident in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, the poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day; that by honest work I had earned a dollar.” In 1828 Mr. Gentry, of Gentryville, loaded a flatboat with produce, put his son in charge of it and hired Lincoln for eight dollars a month and board to work the bow oars and take it to New Orleans. Near Baton Rouge the young men tied the boat up at night and were asleep in a cabin when they were awakened to find a gang of negroes attempting to plunder the cargo. With a club Lincoln knocked several of the marauders into the river and chased the rest for some distance, returning bloody but victorious. The boat was then hurriedly cut loose, and they floated on all night. That voyage was Lincoln’s first brief glimpse of the great world. Till then he had never seen a large city. In New Orleans he was yet to see human beings bought and sold, and hear the groans that were afterwards answered by the thunders of the Civil War. IV Two years later the milk-sickness which had robbed Lincoln of his mother again visited the Pigeon Creek settlers, and his father decided to move to Illinois, where rich lands were to be had cheap. Dennis Hanks and Levi Hall accompanied the Lincoln family. The tall young woodchopper had just passed his twenty-first birthday, and it was he, in buckskin breeches and coonskin cap, who goaded on the oxen hitched to the clumsy wagon that creaked and lurched through the March mud and partly frozen streams on that terrible two weeks’ journey into the Sangamon country of Illinois. He said good-bye to the old log-cabin. It was rude and mean, but, after all, it was his home. He shook hands with his friends in Gentryville. He took a last look at the unmarked grave of his mother. His boyhood was over. Before setting out for his new home, Lincoln spent all his money, more than thirty dollars, in buying petty merchandise, knives, forks, needles, pins, buttons, thread and other things that might appeal to housewives. And on the voyage to Illinois the future President of the United States peddled his little wares so successfully that he doubled his money. Thus Abraham Lincoln entered the State which saw him rise to greatness--woodchopper, ox-driver, peddler, pioneer.