we suddenly found ourselves in the midst of plenty. . .

At night we could camp on the shore, the wreck of a whaleboat which was found near supplying the wood for our fires. While here the supercargo, both mates, and all the sailors but two ran off and went up the country. The supercargo was a knave; he took with him all the charter money, and probably never intends to show his face in San Francisco. The first mate was a villain, had been a pirate, a wrecker, and a murderer, and had made any amount of trouble on board. We were glad to get rid of him. The others were good men, and were seduced by the mates and the supercargo. But the places of all were well supplied by members of our company who had been sailors before, and with a new crew we again set sail. Still the northwest winds continued, and it was not until more than three weeks, and when we were threatened with still another deficiency, that of fire-wood, that the hills which encompass the magnificent bay of San Francisco appeared in sight.

We thought all this bad enough, but what was it compared to what the parties who left us have undergone? The little sloop which I mentioned to you in a former letter as having left Realejo about the beginning of May, with nine of our company and some fifteen of the shipwrecked party, arrived here but the day before yesterday, having been 144 days on the route, 32 days becalmed in one spot under an almost vertical sun. They had only a pint of water apiece a day, much of the time almost perishing for want of food. Once they ran on the coast at a venture, as we did, but found no water. They dug for it, and searched the interior for thirty or forty miles, but in vain, and at length were obliged to put to sea with only a bottle of water apiece, their only chance being to fall in with a vessel, or to make some port within five days, at the end of which time they expected to perish. But the lucky thought of distilling entered their minds. A rude still was made out of a tin boiler and a gun-barrel, salt water was put in, and, to their great joy, it trickled down fresh. For twenty-two days they lived on what they could thus manufacture, averaging half a pint a day to each man, their only food three mussels a day. Some endeavored to walk up the coast, and found themselves in lonely deserts, obliged for days together to live on cactus, and were almost beside themselves for joy when they found a poor,

broken-down mule that had been left by the wayside. Others of our company joined a party which came up from Panama in an iron boat. For months they suffered everything. At length speaking a steamer, one leaped into the water, crying that he was perishing. A rope was thrown to him, and he was dragged on board the steamer; the others have never yet been heard from.

A bungo was also fitted out from Realejo many weeks before we left. The fate of that, too, is unknown, and probably none live to reveal it.

Here the most thrilling tales of sufferings hourly meet the ear. But, so far as we know with certainty, not a death nor even a dangerous attack of illness has occurred in all our company which left New York. Hardships, however, and peril and hunger and thirst, all have been common.

October 7. I will not attempt to convey to you any idea of this most indescribable place, nor to give you my impressions of it-I have not the time, being too busy in arranging and landing my baggage. You already know more of it than I myself do. Such another city never was and never will be. Sharpers, swindlers, speculators, gamblers, and rogues of every nation, clime, color, language, and costume under the sun are here gathered together, and no words can convey a true idea of the result. I do not meet many of my friends on shore; they are mostly in other parts of the country.

SACRAMENTO CITY, October 22, 1849.

I THANK you often from the depths of my soul for the many letters your kind hearts prompted you to write. They were better than all the gold of the mines. By and by I will do my part, but if you knew the whirl my brain has been in ever since I landed in this strange country you would excuse me now. I am like one who is looking on an ever-shifting panorama, and cannot find time to say even a word to the one who sits beside him. Never expect to see me come back rich. I shall not make much money here, except by a streak of good luck. I am here so late, and every avenue is now filled up; but I do hope to get together enough to carry me back richer in experience, to be with you all again. You can conceive nothing of this country. No account that you have ever read can give you half an idea. Double everything, and believe that then you know not the half.

Roger S. Baldwin, Jr.

ARTLY as a blind inference from his humble origin, but more from the misrepresentations made, sometimes in jest, sometimes in malice, during political campaigns, there grew up in the minds of many the strong impression that Mr. Lincoln was ugly, gawky, and ill-mannered; and even in recently written reminiscences the point is sometimes insisted on. In one of the little bits of autobiography which he wrote in the campaign of 1860 at the request of a friend, he thus describes himself: "If any personal description of me is thought desirable, I am in height six feet four inches, nearly; lean in flesh, weighing, on an average, one hundred and eighty pounds; dark complexion, with coarse black hair and gray eyes." To these points we may add the other wellknown peculiarities of Lincoln's form and features: Large head, with high crown of skull; thick, bushy hair; large and deep eye-caverns; heavy eyebrows; a large nose; large ears; large mouth; thin upper and somewhat thick under lip; very high and prominent cheekbones; cheeks thin and sunken; strongly developed jawbones; chin slightly upturned; a thin but sinewy neck, rather long; long arms; large hands; chest thin and narrow as compared with his great height; legs of more than proportionate length, and large feet.

The reader's first impression will naturally be that a man with such long limbs and large and prominent features could not possibly be handsome; and this would be true of a man of ordinary height. But it must be borne in mind that Lincoln's height was extraordinary. A six-footer is a tall man; put four inches on top of that and you have a figure by no means common. Long limbs and large and strong features were fitted to this unusual stature, and harmonized perfectly with it; there was no effect of disproportion or grotesqueness. The beholder felt that here was a strong man, a person of character and power. As an evidence of this I cite two opinions concerning his personal appearance, made by impressions upon observers who noted not only the general effect, but somewhat minute details. The first is from a Philadelphian who visited him at Springfield, soon after his election to the presidency, and wrote this description, which was printed in the Philadelphia "Evening Bulletin," under date of November 14, 1860:

He is about six feet four inches high, and about fifty-one years old. Unfortunately for his personal appearance his great height makes his lankness appear to be excessive, and he has by no means been studious of the graces; his bearing is not attractive, and he does not appear to advantage when standing or walking. Seated, and viewed from the chest up, he is fine looking. His forehead is high and full, and swells out grandly. His eyes are deeply set, and, when his face is reposing, are not remarkable for brightness, but kindle with his thoughts and beam with great expression. His eyebrows are heavy, and move almost incessantly as he becomes animated. The lower part of his face is strongly marked by generally, his chin is broad and massive. His long angular jaws; but, unlike such a formation prominent cheek-bones, angularjaws, heavy chin, and large, full, but closely compressed mouth, with the deep lines about it, impress one with vivid ideas of his sternness, determination, and will. The hollowness of his cheeks gives him a somewhat haggard look, but as he is now cultivating whiskers and a beard, his appearance in very dark, almost black; is luxuriant, and falls that respect will soon be improved. His hair is carelessly but not ungracefully around his wellformed head. No facial muscles show more mobility than his, and consequently his face is an ever-varying mirror in which various expressions are continually flashing. Unlike most very tall men, he is lithe and agile and quick in all his movements and gestures. He talks fluently, uses good strong Saxon, avoids all attempts at display and affectations of any kind. His voice is strong and clear, and his articulation is singularly perfect.

My second citation is from a personal description of him written by Thomas D. Jones, the Cincinnati sculptor, who went to Springfield in December, 1860, and made a bust of Mr. Lincoln. This description was printed in the Cincinnati " Commercial" of October 18, 1871. Doubtless the lapse of years had somewhat dimmed the writer's first impressions; yet as the sculptor's profession had trained him in the art and habit of critical examination of lines and proportions, we may trust his statement both in whole and in detail as that of an accomplished expert.

Soon after reaching Springfield I attended one of Mr. Lincoln's evening receptions; it was there really saw him for the first time to please me. He was surrounded by his nearest and dearest friends, his face illuminated, or, in common parlance, lighted up. He was physically an athlete of the first order. He could lift with ease a thousand pounds, five hundred in each hand. In

height, six feet four inches, and weighed one hundred and seventy-six pounds. He was a spare, bony, lean, and muscular man, which gave him that great and untiring tenacity of endurance during his laborious administration. Mentally he reasoned with great deliberation, but acted promptly, as he did in all of his rough-and-tumble encounters in the West. His arms were very long and powerful. "All I had to do was to extend one hand to a man's shoulder, and with weight of body and strength of arms give him a trip that generally sent him sprawling on the ground, which would so astonish him as to give him a quietus." Well might he send them sprawling." His great strength and height were well calculated to make him a peerless antagonist. Get any man out of balance and he will lie down of his own gravity. His head was neither Greek nor Roman, nor Celt, for his upper lip was too short for that, or a Low German. There are few such men in the world; where they came from originally is not positively known. The profile lines of the forehead and nose resemble each other. General Jackson was one of that type of men. They have no depression in their foreheads at that point called eventuality. The line of the forehead from the root of the nose to the hair above comparison is slightly convex. Such men remember everything and forget nothing. Their eyes are not large, hence their deliberation of speech; neither are they bon vivants nor baldheaded. Mr. Lincoln was decidedly one of that class of men. His habit of thought and a very delicate digestion gave him a lean face and a spare figure. He had a fine suit of hair until the barbers at Washington attended to his toilet.

Mr. Jones adds a strong emphasis to his word-picture by recording how Mr. Lincoln's coming official responsibilities, growing into an overwhelming burden through the serious beginnings of southern secession, wrought an impressive change in his looks.

About two weeks before Mr. Lincoln left Springfield for Washington, a deep-seated melancholy seemed to take possession of his soul. . . . The former Mr. Lincoln was no longer visible to me. His face was transformed from mobility into an iron mask.

In the first of the extracts quoted, mention is made of the fact that he did not appear to advantage when walking or standing. This was not due to any disproportion in his figure, but to the general western habit of an easygoing, loose-jointed manner of walking-a manner necessarily acquired by the pioneers in their forest life, where their paths over inequalities of ground, over logs and stones, made impossible the stiff, upright carriage of men on the unobstructed pavements of cities. So also the sedentary habits which Lincoln's occupation as a lawyer brought upon him in later years had given him what appeared to be a slight stoop of the shoulders, though in reality it was

little else than the mere forward inclination of the head common to nearly all studious and reflective men. As a standing figure he was seen to best advantage on the orator's platform. At certain moments, when, in summing up a connected series of logical propositions, he brought them together into a demonstration of unanswerable argument, his form would straighten up to full height, the head would be slightly thrown back, and the face become radiant with the consciousness of intellectual victory, making his personal appearance grandly imposing and impressive.

Again, the question of looks depended in Lincoln's case very much upon his moods. The large framework of his features was greatly modified by the emotions which controlled them. The most delicate touch of the painter often wholly changes the expression of a portrait; his inability to find that one needed master touch causes the ever-recurring wreck of an artist's fondest hopes. In a countenance the lift of an eyebrow, the curve of a lip, the of strong lines and rugged masses like Lincoln's, flash of an eye, the movements of prominent muscles created a much wider facial play than in rounded immobile countenances. Lincoln's features were the despair of every artist who undertook his portrait. The writer saw nearly a dozen, one after another, soon after the first nomination to the presidency, attempt the task. They put into their pictures the large rugged features, and strong prominent lines; they made measurements to obtain exact proportions; they "petrified" some single look, before these paintings were finished it was plain but the picture remained hard and cold. Even to see that they were unsatisfactory to the artists themselves, and much more so to the intimate friends of the man ; this was not he who smiled, spoke, laughed, charmed. The picture was to the man as the grain of sand to the mountain, as the dead to the living. Graphic art was powerless before a face that moved through a thousand delicate gradations of line and contour, light and shade, sparkle of the eye and curve of the lip, in the long gamut of expression from grave to gay, and back again from the rollicking jollity of laughter to that serious, far-away look that with prophetic intuitions beheld the awful panorama of war, and heard the cry of oppression and suffering. There are many pictures of Lincoln; there is no portrait of him. In his case there was such a difference between the hard literal shell of the physical man, and the fine ideal fiber, temper, and aspiration of his spirit; the extremes were so far apart that no photograph or painting of the former could render even an approximate representation of the latter.

There were also current many flippant and

ill-natured remarks concerning Mr. Lincoln's dress, giving people the idea that he was either very rude by nature, or given to hopeless eccentricities. Nothing could be more untrue. If in so trivial a matter the exact state of his mind is thought worth analyzing, it can be done by recalling the conditions and surroundings under which he grew up.

From his birth until he became of age, his home was a rude frontier log cabin. These cabins were far from being desirable schools of elegant dressing. As a rule they had only a single room, in which the whole family cooked, ate, and slept. They contained only the most indispensable articles of furniture. Changes of clothing were managed when the greater part of the household was out of doors, as was almost constantly the case. Even a tin wash-basin was a rare luxury. Young readers of THE CENTURY will no doubt wonder how the ordinary ablutions were performed. The devices were simple enough; the grown men went to the spring or creek, and the women and children brought the coöperative system into requisition. One person would go to the water-pail, fill the gourd dipper, step a few yards outside the cabin door, and pour water on the hands of the other; and so each was helped in turn. Such a thing as shoeblacking was rarely to be obtained, except as an article of home manufacture, burnt straw being sometimes mixed with grease into a paste for the purpose. But had there been a ton of blacking, it would have been of little general service, even to those who had shoes; for there were no pavements or sidewalks, and everybody's walk was necessarily either in the mud or in the dust.

Yet it must not be hastily inferred that frontier people were habitually slovenly or always dirty. As a rule they did the very best with their poor facilities for personal neatness and adornment; and in this, as usual, the women were the more enterprising and persistent. According to their means they " tidied up" their bare little households, scrubbed their puncheon floors, washed, mended, knit, spun, and in many instances wove, with such skill and application as to contribute materially to the health, comfort, and cleanliness of the family, and often of the neighborhood.

Thus two influences contributed to the formation of Mr. Lincoln's habits and ideas about dress. The principal one was, of course, that of necessity. As a boy in Indiana, as the youth who drove one of the ox-teams that moved the family to Illinois, and cleared and fenced their first field for cultivation, he no doubt wore the ordinary pioneer garb; which in the warm summer weather was reduced to the shirt of coarse unbleached cotton, then commonly called "do

mestic," trousers of butternut or blue jeans, and coarse cow-skin shoes; and no doubt, like other country boys, he was often compelled to substitute for missing suspender-buttons "pins" of the sharp thorns of the honey-locust, or little wooden pegs whittled out with his jackknife. For head-covering, home-made caps of coon-skin were common in winter, and for summer hats of braided oat-straw, which every boy and girl knew how to make.

So long as he remained in his father's family he was necessarily subjected to these pioneer conditions. When he finally floated down the Sangamon River in his canoe to New Salem in 1831, there were doubtless chances for improvement, for New Salem had ten or fifteen houses and a store; and every self-respecting young stripling, launching out into the world as Lincoln did, paid an intuitive tribute to society even in this early form, by making himself presentable to the utmost extent of his means. But day labor in flatboat-building could not immediately furnish him either time or means for personal adornment. His opportunity probably came after the flatboat had arrived in New Orleans, the cargo had been sold, and he had received his pay. We may reasonably surmise that he wore a new suit of clothes when in June he returned by steamboat up the Mississippi to St. Louis, and walked thence to his father's home; and this betterment in his dress was probably continued, as far as might be, when he returned to become a permanent citizen of New Salem, first as the clerk in Offut's store, and later as one of the partners; for the inquisitive eyes of the country beauties who came to trade at his counter, or whom he saw at the little church gatherings on Sunday, could not fail to prompt an ambitious young fellow, early in his twenties, to such care of his person as he could afford.

But circumstances also followed to moderate this temptation. The Clary's Grove boys would not have tolerated any pronounced form of country dude; the store soon failed; the Black Hawk campaign gave him fresh experience in habits of primitive living; and on his return from soldiering, the occupation of deputy surveyor compelled him to a daily routine of encounter with brushwood, briars, and stones, in which his clothing, of whatever texture or cut, suffered the brunt of the battle. It is therefore likely that when he first went to Vandalia, as member of the legislature, the economy of his wardrobe was as remarkable as its neatness.

Here at Vandalia he saw a convocation of samples of all the good clothes and good manners in the State; but this showing could not have been very imposing. The settlement of northern Illinois was scarcely begun. Chicago had only a population of 550, but 27 of whom

were voters, while two years before New Salem precinct alone had given Lincoln 277 votes. The lead-miners who made up the settlement of Galena had reached that place by ascending the Mississippi River. The southern end of the State contained the bulk of its population, largely made up of pioneers from Virginia, the Carolinas, and Kentucky, and had St. Louis, Missouri, for its metropolis; though that city contained only six to eight thousand inhabitants, and did not as yet shed a very wide radiance of refinement in dress and manners, being more than anything else a flourishing entrepôt of the western fur-trade. Society, therefore, as Lincoln found it at Vandalia, was, as afterwards at Springfield, of the make-up and spirit of slave-State pioneers-Virginia customs and ambition modified by the tedious filtration through Kentucky and Indiana forests, and tempered by the craft and the sturdy personal independence taught by the use of the rifle and the ax. They were men generally well through the transition from buckskin to blue jeans, but not yet far on the road from blue jeans to broadcloth. They valued dress and costume as a means, not as an end; they looked more closely at the light in the eye of the neighbor or stranger, than at either the cut or texture of his garb, or the form or gesture of his salutation. In fact there was such an absence of need for fine dress, that external display, except in men of position and well-established reputation, was rather regarded with suspicion. Western river commerce was just beginning a remarkable era of expansion and prosperity, fed by a constantly growing immigration; and river steamboats were haunted by a class of gamblers expert in the various games of cards, who made inexperienced or careless travelers their easy prey. These gamblers as a rule wore . extra good clothes-shining silk hats, fine broadcloth coats, sparkling diamond breastpins; and they assumed all the elegance of manner compatible with their want of breeding and character, and the recklessness and desperation of their vocation. When an over-dressed individual appeared in a western village or community, it was all right if the people knew him to be Governor A. or Judge B. or General C., but if his name and standing were unknown, public opinion was quite sure to set him down as some accomplished professor of draw-poker. The analysis thus far made of the surroundings and probable impressions of Mr. Lincoln during the pioneer period, which lasted, with but slight modifications, from his birth in Kentucky, through the days of his boyhood and youth in Indiana, the trip of emigration to Illinois, his experiences at New Salem, including the flatboat trip to New Orleans and the Black Hawk campaign, and his mixed occupation as

legislator at Vandalia during the winter, and practical surveyor of roads, farm lines, and town sites during the summer, covering in all a period of about thirty years, may seem somewhat prolix, but is very essential because those experiences and surroundings formed the solid and enduring elements of his character. It was this thirty years of life among the people that made and kept him a man of the peoplewhich gave him the characteristics expressed in Lowell's poem:

New birth of our new soil; the first American.

Or, rather, it would be more accurate to say that there was an inborn quality in the individual, a finer essence, a nobler spirit which absorbed and combined in his character the people's virtues, while remaining untouched and untarnished by the people's vices. There is the constant manifestation of the nobler traits, the steady conquest of adversity through industry, patience, courage, self-denial, cheerfulness, ambition, and study.

A champion wrestler among the Clary's Grove boys, he did not become a braggart and bully. His trip to New Orleans gave him no allurement to cards or petty gambling. In his New Salem store he neither learned to chew tobacco nor to drink whisky. His Black Hawk captaincy created no craving for military titles. His appointment to the New Salem postmastership failed to make him a chronic officeseeker. His work of surveying did not convert him into a land speculator. Sorely harassed by debt, he employed no subterfuge that savored of repudiation, but allowed even his surveying instruments to be levied upon by his exacting creditor. He overcame his want with persistent work, and subdued his constitutional melancholy with genial, hopeful cheerfulness. Nay, more, while bearing his own sore privations, he was constantly helpful to others. His popularity was not accidental. He was always and everywhere in request, because he could always and everywhere render a service. The idle crowds wanted him because he could tell a good story. Horse-races and wrestling-matches wanted him as a just and fair umpire. The weak and defenseless wanted his stalwart frame and strong arm. Cross-roads disputants needed his intelligence and reading for explanation or instruction. The volunteers needed him to command them. Politicians needed his advice in caucus, and his speeches on the stump. Everywhere it was actual service rendered that yielded him leadership and influence.

This same clearness of apprehension, this same solidity of judgment, this same intuitive selection of that which was better and higher, which made him so useful to others, served him in directing his own career. He had read