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The Rutledge tavern was a rough, weather-beaten affair with nothing whatever to distinguish it from a thousand other log cabins along the frontier. A stranger would not have given it a second glance; but Lincoln could not keep his eyes off it now, nor his heart out of it. To him, it filled the earth and towered to the sky, and he never crossed the threshold of it without a quickening of his heart.

Borrowing a copy of Shakspere’s plays from Jack Kelso, he stretched himself out on top of the store counter, and, turning over the pages, he read these lines again and again:

But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?

It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.

He closed the book. He could not read. He could not think. He lay there for an hour, dreaming, living over in memory all the lovely things Ann had said the night before. He lived now for only one thing—for the hours that he spent with her.

Quilting parties were popular in those days, and Ann was invariably invited to these affairs, where her slender fingers plied the needle with unusual swiftness and art. Lincoln used to ride with her in the morning to the place where the quilting was to be held, and call for her again in the evening. Once he boldly went into the house—a place where men seldom ventured on such occasions—and sat down beside her. Her heart throbbed, and a flood of color rose to her face. In her excitement she made irregular and uncertain stitches, and the older and more composed women noticed it. They smiled. The owner kept this quilt for years, and after Lincoln became President she proudly displayed it to visitors and pointed out the irregular stitches made by his sweetheart.

On summer evenings Lincoln and Ann strolled together along the banks of the Sangamon, where whippoorwills called in the trees and fireflies wove golden threads through the night.

In the autumn they drifted through the woods when the oaks were flaming with color and hickory-nuts were pattering to the ground. In the winter, after the snow had fallen, they walked through the forest, when—

Every oak and ash and walnut

Wore ermine too dear for an earl

And the poorest twig on the elm tree

Was ridged inch-deep with pearl.

For both of them, now, life had taken on a sacred tenderness, a new and strangely beautiful meaning. When Lincoln but stood and looked down into Ann’s blue eyes her heart sang within her; and at the mere touch of her hands he caught his breath and was amazed to discover that there was so much felicity in all the world. . . .

A short time before this, Lincoln had gone into business with a drunkard, a preacher’s son, named Berry. The little village of New Salem was dying, all its stores were gasping for breath. But neither Lincoln nor Berry could see what was happening, so they bought the wrecks of three of these log-cabin groceries, consolidated them, and started an establishment of their own.

One day a mover who was driving out to Iowa halted his covered wagon in front of the Lincoln & Berry store. The roads were soft, his horses were tired, and the mover decided to lighten his load. So he sold Lincoln a barrel of household plunder. Lincoln didn’t want the plunder, but he felt sorry for the horses; he paid the mover fifty cents, and without examining the barrel rolled it into the back room of the store.

A fortnight later he emptied the contents of the barrel out on the floor, idly curious to see what he had bought. There, at the bottom of the rubbish, he found a complete edition of Black-stone’s Commentaries on Law; and started to read. The farmers were busy in their fields, and customers were few and far between, so he had plenty of time. And the more he read, the more interested he became. Never before had he been so absorbed in a book. He read until he had devoured all four volumes.

Then he made a momentous decision: he would be a lawyer. He would be the kind of man Ann Rutledge would be proud to marry. She approved his plans, and they were to be married as soon as he completed his law studies and established himself in the profession.

After finishing Blackstone he set out across the prairies for Springfield, twenty miles away, to borrow other law-books from an attorney he had met in the Black Hawk War. On his way home he carried an open book in one hand, studying as he walked. When he struck a knotty passage, he shuffled to a standstill, and concentrated on it until he had mastered the sense.

He kept on studying, until he had conquered twenty or thirty pages, kept on until dusk fell and he could no longer see to read. . . . The stars came out, he was hungry, he hastened his pace.

He pored over his books now incessantly, having heart for little else. By day he lay on his back, reading in the shade of an elm that grew beside the store, his bare feet angling up against the trunk of the tree. By night he read in the cooper’s shop, kindling a light from the waste material lying about. Frequently he read aloud to himself, now and then closing the book and writing down the sense of what he had just read, revising, rephrasing it until it became clear enough for a child to comprehend.

Wherever Lincoln went now—on his rambles along the river, on his walks through the woods, on his way to labor in the fields—wherever he went, a volume of Chitty or Blackstone was under his arm. Once a farmer, who had hired him to cut firewood, came around the corner of the barn in the middle of the afternoon and found Lincoln sitting barefooted on top of the woodpile, studying law.

Mentor Graham told Lincoln that if he aspired to get ahead in politics and law he must know grammar.

“Where can I borrow one?” Lincoln asked.

Graham said that John Vance, a farmer living six miles out in the country, had a copy of Kirkham’s Grammar; and Lincoln arose immediately, put on his hat, and was off after the book.

He astonished Graham with the speed with which he mastered Kirkham’s rules. Thirty years later this schoolmaster said he had taught more than five thousand students, but that Lincoln was the “most studious, diligent, straightforward young man in the pursuit of knowledge and literature” he had ever met.

“I have known him,” said Mentor Graham, “to study for hours the best way of three to express an idea.”

Having mastered Kirkham’s Grammar, Lincoln devoured next Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” Rol-lin’s “Ancient History,” a volume on American military biography, lives of Jefferson, Clay, and Webster, and Tom Paine’s “Age of Reason.”

Dressed in “blue cotton roundabout coat, stoga shoes, and pale-blue casinet pantaloons which failed to make the connection with either coat or socks, coming about three inches below the former and an inch or two above the latter,” this extraordinary young man drifted about New Salem, reading, studying, dreaming, telling stories, and making “a host of friends wherever he went.”

The late Albert J. Beveridge, the outstanding Lincoln scholar of his time, says in his monumental biography:

“Not only did his wit, kindliness and knowledge attract the people, but his strange clothes and uncouth awkwardness advertised him, the shortness of his trousers causing particular remark and amusement. Soon the name of ‘Abe Lincoln’ became a household word.”

Finally the grocery firm of Lincoln & Berry failed. This was to be expected, for, with Lincoln absorbed in his books and Berry half groggy with whisky, the end was inevitable. Without a dollar left to pay for his meals and lodging now, Lincoln had to do any kind of manual labor he could find: he cut brush, pitched hay, built fences, shucked corn, labored in a sawmill, and worked for a while as a blacksmith.

Then, with the aid of Mentor Graham, he plunged into the intricacies of trigonometry and logarithms, prepared himself to be a surveyor, bought a horse and compass on credit, cut a grape-vine to be used as a chain, and started out surveying town lots for thirty-seven and a half cents apiece.

In the meantime the Rutledge tavern also had failed, and Lincoln’s sweetheart had had to go to work as a servant in a farmer’s kitchen. Lincoln soon got a job plowing corn on the same farm. In the evening he stood in the kitchen wiping the dishes which Ann washed. He was filled with a vast happiness at the very thought of being near her. Never again was he to experience such rapture and such content. Shortly before his death he confessed to a friend that he had been happier as a barefoot farm laborer back in Illinois than lie had ever been in the White House.

But the ecstasy of the lovers was as short as it was intense. In August, 1835, Ann fell ill. At first there was no pain, nothing but great fatigue and weariness. She tried to carry on her work as usual, but one morning she was unable to get out of bed. That day the fever came, and her brother rode over to New Salem for Dr. Allen. He pronounced it typhoid. Her body seemed to be burning, but her feet were so cold that they had to be warmed with hot stones. She kept begging vainly for water. Medical science now knows that she should have been packed in ice and given all the water she could drink, but Dr. Allen didn’t know that.

Dreadful weeks dragged by. Finally Ann was so exhausted that she could no longer raise even her hands from the sheets. Dr. Allen ordered absolute rest, visitors were forbidden, and that night when Lincoln came even he was not permitted to see her. But the next day and the following day she kept murmuring his name and calling for him so pitifully that he was sent for. When he arrived, he went to her bedside immediately, the door was closed, and they were left alone. This was the last hour of the lovers together.

The next day Ann lost consciousness and remained unconscious until her death.

The weeks that followed were the most terrible period of Lincoln’s life. He couldn’t sleep. He wouldn’t eat. He repeatedly said that he didn’t want to live, and he threatened to kill himself. His friends became alarmed, took his pocket-knife away, and watched to keep him from throwing himself into the river. He avoided people, and when he met them he didn’t speak, didn’t even seem to see them, but appeared to be staring into another world, hardly conscious of the existence of this.

Day after day he walked five miles to the Concord Cemetery, where Ann was buried. Sometimes he sat there so long that his friends grew anxious, and went and brought him home. When the storms came, he wept, saying that he couldn’t bear to think of the rain beating down upon her grave.

Once he was found stumbling along the Sangamon, mumbling incoherent sentences. People feared he was losing his mind.

So Dr. Allen was sent for. Realizing what was wrong, he said Lincoln must be given some kind of work, some activity to occupy his mind.

A mile to the north of town lived one of Lincoln’s closest friends, Bowling Greene. He took Lincoln to his home, and assumed complete charge of him. It was a quiet, secluded spot. Behind the house oak-covered bluffs rose and rolled back to the west. In front the flat bottom-lands stretched away to the Sangamon River, framed in trees. Nancy Greene kept Lincoln busy cutting wood, digging potatoes, picking apples, milking the cows, holding the yarn for her as she spun.

The weeks grew into months, and the months into years, but Lincoln continued to grieve. In 1837, two years after Ann’s death, he said to a fellow-member of the State Legislature:

“Although I seem to others to enjoy life rapturously at times, yet when I am alone I am so depressed that I am afraid to trust myself to carry a pocket-knife.”

From the day of Ann’s death he was a changed individual. The melancholy that then settled upon him lifted at times for short intervals; but it grew steadily worse, until he became the saddest man in all Illinois.

Herndon, later his law partner, said:

“If Lincoln ever had a happy day in twenty years, I never knew of it. . . . Melancholy dripped from him as he walked.”

From this time to the end of his life, Lincoln had a fondness, almost an obsession, for poems dealing with sorrow and death. He would often sit for hours without saying a word, lost in reverie, the very picture of dejection, and then would suddenly break forth with these lines from “The Last Leaf”:

The mossy marbles rest

On the lips that he has prest

In their bloom;

And the names he loved to hear

Have been carved for many a year

On the tomb.

Shortly after Ann’s death, he memorized a poem “Mortality” and beginning, “Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?”

It became his favorite. He often repeated it to himself when he thought no one else was listening; repeated it to people in the country hotels of Illinois; repeated it in public addresses; repeated it to guests in the White House; wrote copies of it for his friends; and said:

“I would give all I am worth, and go in debt, to be able to write like that.”

He loved the last two stanzas best:

Yea! hope and despondency, pleasure and pain,

Are mingled together in sunshine and rain;

And the smile and the tear and the song and the dirge

Still follow each other, like surge upon surge.

Tis the wink of an eye, ’tis the draught of a breath,

From the blossom of health to the paleness of death,

From the gilded saloon to the bier and the shroud,—

Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?

The old Concord Cemetery, where Ann Rutledge was buried, is a peaceful acre in the midst of a quiet farm, surrounded on three sides by wheat-fields and on the fourth by a blue-grass pasture where cattle feed and sheep graze. The cemetery itself is overgrown now with brush and vines, and is seldom visited by man. In the springtime the quails make their nests in it and the silence of the place is broken only by the bleating of sheep and the call of the bob-white.

For more than half a century the body of Ann Rutledge lay there in peace. But in 1890 a local undertaker started a new cemetery in Petersburg, four miles away. Petersburg already had a beautiful and commodious burying-ground known as the Rose Hill Cemetery; so selling lots in the new one was slow and difficult. Consequently, the greedy undertaker, in an unholy moment, conceived the gruesome scheme of violating the grave of Lincoln’s sweetheart, bringing her dust to his cemetery, and using its presence there as an argument to boost sales.

So “on or about the fifteenth of May, 1890”—to quote the exact words of his shocking confession—he opened her grave. And what did he find? We know, for there is a quiet old lady still living in Petersburg who told the story to the author of this volume, and made an affidavit to its veracity. She is the daughter of McGrady Rutledge, who was a first cousin of Ann Rutledge. McGrady Rutledge often worked with Lincoln in the fields, helped him as a surveyor, ate with him and shared his bed with him, and probably knew more about Lincoln’s love for Ann than any other third person has ever known.

On a quiet summer evening this old lady sat in a rocking-chair on her porch and told the author: “I have often heard Pa say that after Ann’s death Mr. Lincoln would walk five miles out to Ann’s grave and stay there so long that Pa would get worried and fear something would happen to him, and go and bring him home. ... Yes, Pa was with the undertaker when Ann’s grave was opened, and I have often heard him tell that the only trace they could find of Ann’s body was four pearl buttons from her dress.”

So the undertaker scooped up the four pearl buttons, and some dirt and interred them in his new Oakland Cemetery at Petersburg—and then advertised that Ann Rutledge was buried there.

And now, in the summer months, thousands of pilgrims motor there to dream over what purports to be her grave; I have seen them stand with bowed heads and shed tears above the four pearl buttons. Over those four buttons there stands a beautiful granite monument bearing this verse from Edgar Lee Masters’ “Spoon River Anthology”:

Out of me unworthy and unknown

The vibrations of deathless music:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all.”

Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions,

And the beneficent face of a nation Shining with justice and truth.

I am Ann Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds,

Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln,

Wedded to him, not through union,

But through separation.

Bloom forever, O Republic,

From the dust of my bosom!

But Ann’s sacred dust remains in the old Concord Cemetery. The rapacious undertaker could not carry it away—she and her memories are still there. Where the bob-white calls and the wild rose blows, there is the spot that Abraham Lincoln hallowed with his tears, there is the spot where he said his heart lay buried, there would Ann Rutledge wish to be.