been the central interest of his life; and the lavish hospitality which had been freely bestowed upon all was especially directed to those who were connected with his protégé.

He continued in the enjoyment of a hale old age, able to undergo both physical and mental toil. Meanwhile, his pecuniary difficulties had been increasing every year, and the boundless hospitality of his house and temperament interfered with retrenchment. He at last resolved to sell his estate by lottery, for which the sanction of the Legislature had first to be obtained; but after much trouble and expense the scheme fell through, and resulted in failure, for delay prevented the tickets being put into the market till after his death, and public feeling, which pitied the spectacle of an ex-President overburdened with debt, was not sufficiently moved by the fate of his family.

In 1826, illness compelled Thomas Jefferson to refuse an invitation to Washington to celebrate the jubilee of the Declaration of Independence. The illness developed into dysentery; his strength gradually failed; and on July 4, the very day of the jubilee of the Independence of the United States, Thomas Jefferson died. He was buried in a small burying-place at Monticello beside his wife. His funeral was simple and unpretending. On the granite obelisk that marks his grave there is the following inscription, found in his own handwriting among his papers :—

HERE LIES BURIED

Thomas Jefferson,

AUTHOR OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE, OF THE STATUTE OF VIRGINIA FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM, AND FATHER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA.

His character is to be gleaned from his actions; his political merits from his political career. 'Say nothing of my religion,' he once wrote; 'it is known to my God and myself alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life; if that has been honest and dutiful to society, the religion which regulated it cannot be a bad one.' When pressed, he called himself a Unitarian. His philosophy of life is perhaps best summed up in the advice he once wrote for a name-child :—'Adore God. Reverence and cherish your parents. Love your neighbour as yourself, your country more than yourself. Be just. Be true. Murmur not at the ways of Providence. Never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day. Never trouble another for what you can do yourself. Never spend your money before you have it. Never buy what you do not want because it is cheap; it I will be dear to you. Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst, and cold. We never repent of having eaten too little. Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly. How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened. Take things by the smooth handle. When angry, count ten before you speak; when very angry, a hundred.'

NE of the latest biographers of Abraham Lincoln writes on his title-page the following motto from

Machiavelli's Florentine History:-'When in a republic a good, wise, and powerful citizen appears,—which is but seldom,-who establishes ordinances capable of appeasing or restraining slavery or licence, then the government may be called free, and its institutions firm and secure.' Truly Lincoln, sixteenth President of the United States of America, was a good, wise, and powerful citizen, and his career is a noble example of the rise of pure merit, which is one of the proudest boasts of the great Western Republic. Born in the humblest rank of life, and almost entirely destitute of regular education, Abraham Lincoln rose steadily, by the force of his own worth, through the grades of labourer, flat - boatman, grocery storekeeper, land-surveyor, and lawyer, to be the honoured and beloved President of a mighty country, till at last he laid down his life as a martyr of freedom.

Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in a miserable hovel erected on the banks of the Nolin Creek, near Hodgensville, in the present county of La Rue (then Hardin County) in Kentucky. His father, Thomas Lincoln, nominally a carpenter, was of a roving and thriftless disposition, and had wandered into Kentucky from Washington

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County in Virginia, whither his mother had removed after the murder of her husband by the Indians of Mercer County, then on the frontier. Abraham's mother was Nancy Hanks, a tall and handsome woman, but she died before her little son was ten years old, and his real mother was his father's second wife, who came in 1819 to the cheerless home which Lincoln had made at last in Indiana. Sally Bush had been an old sweetheart of Thomas Lincoln's in Kentucky, but she had refused the lazy carpenter, and married a Mr. Johnston. Now she was a widow, and, trusting to the deceptive accounts that her former lover gave of his present prosperity, she agreed to become his wife. When she arrived at the bare and comfortless log-cabin, near the site of the present Gentryville in Indiana, that represented the home of the poor little President, with his father and sister, her surprise and disappointment were keen. But she was active and intelligent, and set herself at once to bring matters to rights. She caused her husband to supply flooring and windows, that till then had been wanting, even in this carpenter's house; her own good stock of furniture filled the cabin comfortably, and, better than all, her large heart welcomed the two little motherless children beside her own son and two daughters, and in a very short time, to use her own words, she 'made them look a little more human.' There perhaps was no more important event in Lincoln's life than his father's second marriage. Without Sally Bush's guidance and encouragement, his fine abilities might have rusted and been waste, his ambition might have limited itself to the walls of a village public-house, and the slaves in America might have had to bear their chains for another generation. He was fully aware of what he owed to this noble woman; to his own mother he made but few allusions

in after-life, and all his expressions of love and gratitude to his 'mother' were meant for Sally Bush. She loved him as her son, and he repaid her with a son's duty. No prouder tribute could be paid to him than her words, spoken after his death: -'I can say what scarcely one woman—a mother-can say in a thousand. Abe never gave me a cross word or look, and never refused, in fact or in appearance, to do anything I requested him.'

Under such auspices Abraham began to attend school. He had already had some teaching in Kentucky, but it was intermittent, and even now the poverty of the Lincolns was too great to allow Abraham to go to school regularly. Although his schooling extended over several years, he had not more than one year's teaching in the aggregate; all that he acquired beyond that was self-taught. He speedily gave proof of great capacity; but the growth of his mind, rapid as it was, was beaten by that of his body. At sixteen he had almost attained his full height of six feet four inches, and his lank figure, in the buckskin breeches, always twelve inches too short for him, topped by a shrivelled and tanned countenance, must have looked inexpressibly grotesque, especially when, in the course of learning 'manners,' he was brought in and solemnly introduced to his school-mates, according to the custom. His intellectual forte was spelling, and he also began to indulge himself in writing original compositions, for which a favourite subject was cruelty to animals. It is interesting, too, to know that he early developed a love for speaking in public and haranguing; and, indeed, when he began to go out working for the neighbouring farmers, his talent for 'preaching' and humorous speaking was often distracting to his fellow-workers and irritating to their common employers.