THE LEGEND OF THE ARBUTUS

In the North Country there once lived an old, old man all alone in his wigwam among the pine trees. His hair and beard were long and white, and he wore a bearskin to keep him warm.

All about his wigwam it was winter. The little brooks were locked fast under their ice, the wind cried in the trees, and not a squirrel or a blue jay was to be seen. The old man crouched over his bit of fire

and shivered because he was so cold.

But one day there came through the woods a beautiful maiden. Her cheeks were as pink as roses, her eyes were as soft and dark as the skies at twilight, and her hair was as brown as October's nuts. The most beautiful thing of all was this: wherever she stepped on the frozen ground with her white slippers made of lilies, the dew fell and the sweet grasses and ferns grew.

So she came to the old man's wigwam. Her breath was as sweet as clover, and when she entered the tent it became warm and fragrant, like a June day.

66

'Why do you come here?" asked the old man. “I have breathed on the woods, and it is winter."

"When I breathe," said the maiden, softly, "the violet and the wind-flower blossom."

"I shake my locks," said the old man, "and snow covers all the earth.”

"I toss my curls," said the maiden, " and the warm rain falls."

"When I walk among the trees, the leaves fall, the squirrels and the beavers hide, and the blue jay and the wild geese fly south."

"When I come," said the maiden, "the branches break into leaves, the brooks sing, and the birds fly back again."

And as the maiden spoke, the air in the wigwam grew warmer and warmer, and the old man lay down. upon the ground, for his eyes were heavy with sleep. The maiden kneeled down beside him and just rested her warm fingers on his forehead. And where the old man had lain there was, all at once, only a mass of green leaves with soft moss growing all about.

"I am stronger than the winter," said the maiden. Then she took from her dress the loveliest pink and white flowers, and she hid them under the green leaves.

"I will give you my most precious flowers," she said, "and my sweetest breath, but whoever picks you, Arbutus, must kneel, as I do."

Then the maiden floated away over the woods, the hills, and the plains, and wherever she went the flowers sprang up and summer came upon the earth.

-FROM AN INDIAN MYTH.

wig'wam: an Indian house. It is in the shape of a cone and is made of poles and skins.—ärbū’tus: a little pink and white flower which grows close to the ground and blossoms early in the spring.

THE BOY-LIFE OF LINCOLN

He was long; he was strong; he was wiry. He was never sick, was always good-natured, never a bully, always a friend of the weak, the small and the unprotected.

He must have been a strange looking boy. His skin was sallow, and his hair was black. He wore a linsey-woolsey shirt, buckskin breeches, a coon-skin cap, and heavy "clumps" of shoes. He grew so fast that his breeches never came down to the tops of his shoes, and, since he did not wear stockings, you could always see "twelve inches of shinbones," sharp, blue, and narrow, between his shoes and his breeches leg.

He laughed much, was always ready to give and take jokes and hard knocks, had a squeaky, changing voice, a small head, big ears-and was always what Thackeray called a "gentleman."

Such was Abraham Lincoln at fifteen.

He was never cruel, mean, or unkind. His first composition was on cruelty to animals, written because he had tried to make the other boys stop "teasin' tarrypins," that is, catching turtles and putting hot coals on their backs just to make them move along lively.

He had to work hard at home; for his father

would not work, and things needed to be attended to if "the place" was to be kept from dropping to pieces.

He became a great reader. He read every book and newspaper he could get hold of, and if he came across anything in his reading that he wished to remember he would copy it on a shingle, because writing paper was scarce, and either learn it by heart or hide the shingle away until he could get some paper to copy it on. His father thought he read too much.

"It will spoil him for work," he said. "He doesn't do half enough about the place, as it is now, and books and paper are no good."

But Abraham, with all his reading, did more work than his father any day; his stepmother, too, took his side and at last got her husband to let the boy read and study at home.

"Abe was a good son to me," she said, many years after, "and we took particular care when he was reading not to disturb him. We would just let him read on and on till he stopped of his own accord."

The boy kept a sort of shingle scrap-book; he kept a paper scrap-book, too. Into these he would put whatever he cared to keep, poetry, history, funny sayings, fine passages. He had a scrap-book for his arithmetic "sums," too, and one of these is still in existence with this boyish rhyme in a boyish

scrawl, underneath one of his tables of weights and

measures:

Abraham Lincoln
his hand and pen

he will be good but

god knows When.

God did know when; and that boy, all unknowingly, was working toward the day when his hand and pen were to do more for humanity than any other hand or pen of modern times.

Lamps and candles were almost unknown in his home, and Abraham, flat on his stomach, would often do his reading, writing, and ciphering in the firelight, as it flashed and flickered on the big hearth of his logcabin home.

One day Abraham found that a man for whom he sometimes worked owned a copy of Weems's "Life of Washington." This was a famous book in its day. Abraham borrowed it at once. When he was not reading it, he put it away on a shelf, a board resting on wooden pins. There was a big crack between the logs behind the shelf, and one rainy day the "Life of Washington" fell into the crack and was soaked almost into pulp.

Old Mr. Crawford, from whom Abraham borrowed the book, was a cross, cranky, and sour old fellow, and when the boy told him of the accident he said Abraham must "work the book out."