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Some of the rails split by Lincoln at that time were thirty years later carried into the convention which nominated him for President.

Having reached his majority and seen his father and family safely housed, Lincoln started out to shift for himself. Among other things, he split three thousand rails for a Major Warnick, walking three miles a day to his work.

Then came the winter of “the deep snow,” a season so terrible that John Hay has thus described its effects:

“Geese and chickens were caught by the feet and wings and frozen to the wet ground. A drove of a thousand hogs, which were being driven to St. Louis, rushed together for warmth, and became piled in a great heap. Those inside smothered and those outside froze, and the ghastly pyramid remained there on the prairie for weeks; the drovers barely escaped with their lives. Men killed their horses, disemboweled them, and crept into the cavities of their bodies to escape the murderous wind.”

Lincoln left his father’s house empty-handed, save for his axe, and he had to face that blizzard winter as best he could. No man or woman ever heard him complain. In all his after years he looked back upon the struggles of his early career without a word of self-pity. Those were iron days, but they were not without romance, and life was honest and strengthening.