Chapter 4

Lincoln loved fair play as he hated shams; and throughout these early years in Springfield are examples of his boldness in insisting that friend and enemy have the chance due them. A most dramatic case of this kind occurred at a political meeting held one evening in the Springfield court-room, which at that date was temporarily in a hall under Stuart and Lincoln's law office. Directly over the platform was a trap-door. Lincoln frequently would lie by this opening during a meeting, listening to the speeches. One evening one of his friends, E.D. Baker, in speaking angered the crowd, and an attempt was made to "pull him down." Before the assailants could reach the platform, however, a pair of long legs dangled from the trap-door, and in an instant Lincoln dropped down beside Baker, crying out, "Hold on, gentlemen, this is a land of free speech." His appearance was so unexpected, and his attitude so determined, that the crowd soon was quiet, and Baker went on with his speech.

In all the intellectual life of the town he took a place. With a few of the leading young men he formed a young men's lyceum. One of his speeches before this body has been preserved in full. Its subject is "The Perpetuation of our Political Institutions."[4] The speech has not, however, any of the peculiarly original style which usually characterized his efforts.

He came immediately to be a favorite figure in all sorts of local affairs. What he said and did on these occasions is still recollected by those interested in them. "When the seat of government was removed from Vandalia to Springfield in 1836," says the Rev. Peter Wallace of Chicago "I obtained the contract of taking down the court-house to make a place for the State House. Lincoln, with others, was present to receive the job. 'Peter,' he said to me, 'if you succeed as well in building houses as you have in tearing this one down, you will make your mark as a builder.'" Mr. Wallace tells, too, of hearing Lincoln say in a speech, at the funeral of one of their friends: "I read in a book whose author never errs, 'Woe unto you when all men shall speak well of you.' Our friend will escape that woe, for he would be the exception had he no enemies."

The most pleasing feature of his early life in the town was the way in which he attached all classes of people to him. He naturally, from his political importance and from his relation to Mr. Stuart, was admitted to the most exclusive circle of society. But Lincoln was not received there from tolerance of his position only. The few members left of that interesting circle of Springfield in the thirties are emphatic in their statements that he was recognized as a valuable social factor. If indifferent to forms and little accustomed to conventional usages, he had a native dignity and self-respect which stamped him at once as a superior man. He had a good will, an easy adaptability to people, which made him take a hand in everything that went on. His name appears in every list of banqueters and merry-makers reported in the Springfield papers. He even served as committee-man for cotillion parties. "We liked Lincoln, though he was not gay," said one charming and cultivated old lady to me in Springfield. "He rarely danced, he was never very attentive to ladies, but he was always a welcome guest everywhere, and the centre of a circle of animated talkers. Indeed, I think the only thing we girls had against Lincoln was that he always attracted all the men around him."

Lincoln's kindly interest and perfectly democratic feeling attached to him many people whom he never met save on the streets. Indeed his life in the streets of Springfield is a most touching and delightful study. He concerned himself in the progress of every building which was put up, of every new street which was opened; he passed nobody without recognition; he seemed always to have time to stop and talk. He became, in fact, part of Springfield street life, just as he had of the town's politics and society. By 1840 there was no man in the town better known, better liked, more sought for; though there were more than one whose future was considered brighter.

* * * * *

[Footnote 1: Reminiscences of Mr. Weir, a former resident of Sangamon County, related by E.B. Howell of Butte, Montana.]

[Footnote 2: Summary condensed from Moses's "History of Illinois."]

[Footnote 3: The original of this letter is owned by E.R. Oeltjen of Petersburg, Illinois.]

[Footnote 4: Lincoln's address on "The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions" is dated January 27, 1837, in most biographies, but it was published in the "Sangamo Journal" of February 3, 1838. The address is preceded by the following resolution:

"YOUNG MEN'S LYCEUM, SPRINGFIELD, _January 27, 1837[8]_.

"_Resolved_, That the thanks of this Lyceum be presented to A. Lincoln, Esq., for the lecture delivered by him this evening, and that he be solicited to furnish a copy for publication.

"JAS. H. MATHENY, _Secretary_"

The confusion as to the date of the delivery of this address evidently arises from the fact that the resolution here quoted bears the date of "1837"--a mere slip of the pen, of course. In January, 1837, Lincoln was in the legislature at Vandalia. He had not yet become a resident of Springfield. According to Mr. Herndon, who was a member of the Young Men's Lyceum, that society was not formed until the fall of 1837.]

THE SHIP THAT FOUND HERSELF.

BY RUDYARD KIPLING,

Author of "The Jungle Book," "Plain Tales from the Hills," etc.

It was her first voyage, and though she was only a little cargo steamer of two thousand five hundred tons, she was the very best of her kind, the outcome of forty years of experiments and improvements in framework and machinery; and her designers and owners thought just as much of her as though she had been the "Lucania." Any one can make a floating hotel that will pay her expenses, if he only puts enough money into the saloon, and charges for private baths, suites of rooms, and such like; but in these days of competition and low freights every square inch of a cargo boat must be built for cheapness, great hold capacity, and a certain steady speed. This boat was perhaps two hundred and forty feet long and thirty-two feet wide, with arrangements that enabled her to carry cattle on her main and sheep on her upper deck if she wanted to; but her great glory was the amount of cargo that she could store away in her holds. Her owners--they were a very well-known Scotch family--came round with her from the North, where she had been launched and christened and fitted, to Liverpool, where she was to take cargo for New York; and the owner's daughter, Miss Frazier, went to and fro on the clean decks, admiring the new paint and the brass-work and the patent winches, and particularly the strong, straight bow, over which she had cracked a bottle of very good champagne when she christened the steamer the "Dimbula." It was a beautiful September afternoon, and the boat in all her newness (she was painted lead color, with a red funnel) looked very fine indeed. Her house flag was flying, and her whistle from time to time acknowledged the salutes of friendly boats, who saw that she was new to the sea and wished to make her welcome.

"And now," said Miss Frazier, delightedly, to the captain, "she's a real ship, isn't she? It seems only the other day father gave the order for her, and now--and now--isn't she a beauty?" The girl was proud of the firm, and talked as though she were the controlling partner.

"Oh, she's no so bad," the skipper replied, cautiously. "But I'm sayin' that it takes more than the christenin' to mak' a ship. In the nature o' things, Miss Frazier, if ye follow me, she's just irons and rivets and plates put into the form of a ship. She has to find herself yet."

"But I thought father said she was exceptionally well found."

"So she is," said the skipper, with a laugh. "But it's this way wi' ships, Miss Frazier. She's all here, but the parts of her have not learned to work together yet. They've had no chance."

"But the engines are working beautifully. I can hear them."

"Yes, indeed. But there is more than engines to a ship. Every inch of her, ye'll understand, has to be livened up, and made to work wi' its neighbor--sweetenin' her, we call it, technically."

"And how will you do it?" the girl asked.

"We can no more than drive and steer her and so forth; but if we have rough weather this trip--it's likely--she'll learn the rest by heart! For a ship, ye'll obsairve, Miss Frazier, is in no sense a reegid body, closed at both ends. She's a highly complex structure o' various an' conflictin' strains, wi' tissues that must give an' tak' accordin' to her personal modulus of eelasteecity." Mr. Buchanan, the chief engineer, in his blue coat with gilt buttons, was coming toward them. "I'm sayin' to Miss Frazier, here, that our little 'Dimbula' has to be sweetened yet, and nothin' but a gale will do it. How's all wi' your engines, Buck?"

"Well enough--true by plumb an' rule, of course; but there's no spontaneeity yet." He turned to the girl. "Take my word, Miss Frazier, and maybe ye'll comprehend later, even after a pretty girl's christened a ship it does not follow that there's such a thing as a ship under the men that work her."

"I was sayin' the very same, Mr. Buchanan," the skipper interrupted.

"That's more metaphysical than I can follow," said Miss Frazier, laughing.

"Why so? Ye're good Scotch, an'--I knew your mother's father; he was fra' Dumfries--ye've a vested right in metapheesics, Miss Frazier, just as ye have in the 'Dimbula,'" the engineer said.

"Eh, well, we must go down to the deep watters, an' earn Miss Frazier her deevidends. Will you not come to my cabin for tea?" said the skipper. "We'll be in dock the night, and when you're goin' back to Glasgie ye can think of us loadin' her down an' drivin' her forth--all for your sake."

In the next four days they stowed nearly four thousand tons dead weight into the "Dimbula," and took her out from Liverpool. As soon as she met the lift of the open water she naturally began to talk. If you put your ear to the side of the cabin the next time you are in a steamer, you will hear hundreds of little voices in every direction, thrilling and buzzing, and whispering and popping, and gurgling and sobbing and squeaking exactly like a telephone in a thunder storm. Wooden ships shriek and growl and grunt, but iron vessels throb and quiver through all their hundreds of ribs and thousands of rivets. The "Dimbula" was very strongly built, and every piece of her had a letter or a number or both to describe it, and every piece had been hammered or forged or rolled or punched by man and had lived in the roar and rattle of the shipyard for months. Therefore, every piece had its own separate voice in exact proportion to the amount of trouble spent upon it. Cast iron, as a rule, says very little; but mild steel plates and wrought iron, and ribs and beams that have been bent and welded and riveted a good deal, talk continuously. Their conversation, of course, is not half as wise as human talk, because they are all, though they do not know it, bound down one to the other in black darkness, where they cannot tell what is happening near them, nor what is going to happen next.

A very short while after she had cleared the Irish coast a sullen, gray-headed old wave of the Atlantic climbed leisurely over her straight bows, and sat down on the steam capstan, used for hauling up the anchor. Now, the capstan and the engine that drove it had been newly painted red and green; besides which, nobody cares for being ducked.

"Don't you do that again," the capstan sputtered through the teeth of his cogs. "Hi! Where's the fellow gone?"

The wave had slouched overside with a plop and a chuckle; but "Plenty more where he came from," said a brother wave, and went through and over the capstan, who was bolted firmly to an iron plate on the iron deck beams below.

"Can't you keep still up there," said the deck beams. "What's the matter with you? One minute you weigh twice as much as you ought to, and the next you don't."

"It isn't my fault," said the capstan. "There's a green brute from outside that comes and hits me on the head."

"Tell that to the shipwrights. You've been in position up there for months, and you've never wriggled like this before. If you aren't careful you'll strain _us_."

"Talking of strain," said a low, rasping, unpleasant voice, "are any of you fellows--you deck beams, we mean--aware that those exceedingly ugly knees of yours happen to be riveted into our structure--_ours_?"

"Who might you be?" the deck beams inquired.

"Oh, nobody in particular," was the answer. "We're only the port and starboard upper-deck stringers; and, if you persist in heaving and hiking like this, we shall be reluctantly compelled to take steps."

Now, the stringers of the ship are long iron girders, so to speak, that run lengthways from stern to bow. They keep the iron frames (what are called ribs in a wooden ship) in place, and also help to hold the ends of the deck beams which go from side to side of the ship. Stringers always consider themselves most important, because they are so long. In the "Dimbula" there were four stringers on each side--one far down by the bottom of the hold, called the bilge stringer; one a little higher up, called the side stringer; one on the floor of the lower deck; and the upper-deck stringers that have been heard from already.

"You will take steps, will you?" This was a long, echoing rumble. It came from the frames; scores and scores of them, each one about eighteen inches distant from the next, and each riveted to the stringers in four places. "We think you will have a certain amount of trouble in _that_;" and thousands and thousands of the little rivets that held everything together whispered: "You will! You will! Stop quivering and be quiet. Hold on, brethren! Hold on! Hot punches! What's that?"

Rivets have no teeth, so they can't chatter with fright; but they did their best as a fluttering jar swept along the ship from stern to bow, and she shook like a rat in a terrier's mouth.

An unusually severe pitch, for the sea was rising, had lifted the big throbbing screw nearly to the surface, and it was spinning round in a kind of soda water--half sea and half air--going much faster than was right, because there was no deep water for it to work in. As it sank again, the engines--and they were triple-expansion, three cylinders in a row--snorted through all their three pistons: "Was that a joke, you fellow outside? It's an uncommonly poor one. How are we to do _our_ work if you fly off the handle that way?"

"I didn't fly off the handle," said the screw, twirling huskily at the end of the screw shaft. "If I had, _you'd_ have been scrap iron by this time. The sea dropped away from under me, and I had nothing to catch on to. That's all."

"That's all, d'you call it?" said the thrust-block, whose business it is to take the push of the screw; for if a screw had nothing to hold it back it would crawl right into the engine room. (It is the holding back of the screwing action that gives the drive to a ship.) "I know I do my work deep down and out of sight, but I warn you I expect justice. All _I_ ask is justice. Why can't you push steadily and evenly, instead of whizzing like a whirligig and making me hot under all my collars?" The thrust-block had six collars, each faced with brass, and he did not want to get them heated.

All the bearings that supported the fifty feet of screw shaft as it ran to the stern whispered: "Justice--give us justice."

"I can only give you what I get," the screw answered. "Look out! It's coming again!"

He rose with a roar as the "Dimbula" plunged; and "whack--whack--whack--whack" went the engines furiously, for they had little to check them.

"I'm the noblest outcome of human ingenuity--Mr. Buchanan says so," squealed the high-pressure cylinder. "This is simply ridiculous." The piston went up savagely and choked, for half the steam behind it was mixed with dirty water. "Help! Oiler! Fitter! Stoker! Help! I'm choking," it gasped. "Never in the history of maritime invention has such a calamity overtaken one so young and strong. And if I go, who's to drive the ship?"

"Hush! oh, hush!" whispered the steam, who, of course, had been to sea many times before. He used to spend his leisure ashore, in a cloud, or a gutter, or a flower-pot, or a thunder storm, or anywhere else where water was needed. "That's only a little priming, as they call it. It'll happen all night, on and off. I don't say it's nice, but it's the best we can do under the circumstances."

"What difference can circumstances make? I'm here to do my work--on clean, dry steam. Blow circumstances!" the cylinder roared.

"The circumstances will attend to the blowing. I've worked on the North Atlantic run a good many times--it's going to be rough before morning."

"It isn't distressingly calm now," said the extra strong frames, they were called web frames, in the engine room. "There's an upward thrust that we don't understand, and there's a twist that is very bad for our brackets and diamond plates, and there's a sort of northwestward pull that follows the twist, which seriously annoys us. We mention this because _we_ happened to cost a great deal of money, and we feel sure that the owner would not approve of our being treated in this frivolous way."

"I'm afraid the matter's out of the owner's hands for the present," said the steam, slipping into the condenser. "You're left to your own devices till the weather betters."

"I wouldn't mind the weather," said a flat bass voice deep below; "it's this confounded cargo that's breaking my heart. I'm the garboard strake, and I'm twice as thick as most of the others, and I ought to know something."

The garboard strake is the very bottom-most plate in the bottom of a ship, and the "Dimbula's" garboard strake (she was a flat-bottomed boat) was nearly three-quarters of an inch mild steel.

"The sea pushes me up in a way I should never have expected," the strake went on, "and the cargo pushes me down, and between the two I don't know what I'm supposed to do."

"When in doubt, hold on," rumbled the steam, making head in the boilers.

"Yes, but there's only dark and cold and hurry down here, and how do I know whether the other plates are doing their duty? Those bulwark plates up above, I've heard, aren't more than five-sixteenths of an inch thick--scandalous, I call it."

"I agree with you," said a huge web frame by the main cargo hatch. He was deeper and thicker than all the others, and curved half-way across the ship's side in the shape of half an arch, to support the deck where deck beams would have been in the way of cargo coming up and down. "I work entirely unsupported, and I observe that I am the sole strength of this vessel, so far as my vision extends. The responsibility, I assure you, is enormous. I believe the money value of the cargo is over one hundred and fifty thousand pounds. Think of that!"

"And every pound of it dependent on my personal exertions." Here spoke a sea-valve that communicated directly with the water outside and was seated not very far from the garboard strake. "I rejoice to think that I am a Prince-Hyde valve, with best Para rubber facings. Five patents cover me--I mention this without pride--five separate and several patents, each one finer than the other. At present I am screwed fast. Should I open, you would immediately be swamped. This is incontrovertible!"

Patent things always use the longest words they can. It is a trick they pick up from their inventors.

"That's news," said a big centrifugal bilge pump. "I had an idea that you were employed to clean decks and things with. At least, I've used you for that more than once. I forget the precise number in thousands of gallons which I am guaranteed to pump in an hour; but I assure you, my complaining friends, that there is not the least danger. _I_ alone am capable of clearing any water that may find its way here. By my biggest delivery, we pitched then!"

The sea was getting up in workmanlike style. It was a dead westerly gale, blown from under a ragged opening of green sky, narrowed on all sides by fat gray clouds; and the wind bit like pincers, as it fretted the spray into lace-work on the heads of the waves.

"I tell you what it is," the foremast telephoned down its wire stays. "I'm up here, and I can take a dispassionate view of things. There's an organized conspiracy against us. I'm sure of it, because every single one of these waves is heading directly for our bows. The whole sea is concerned in it--and so's the wind. It's awful!"

"What's awful?" said a wave, drowning the capstan for the hundredth time.

"This organized conspiracy on your part," the capstan gurgled, taking his cue from the mast.

"Organized bubbles and spindrift! There has been a depression in the Gulf of Mexico. Excuse me!" He leaped overside; but his friends took up the tale one after another.

"Which has advanced--" _That_ wave threw green over the funnel.

"As far as Cape Hatteras--" _He_ drenched the bridge.

"And is now going out to sea--to sea--to sea!" _He_ went out in three surges, making a clean sweep of a boat, which turned bottom up and sank in the darkening troughs alongside.

"That's all there is to it," seethed the broken water, roaring through the scuppers. "There's no animus in our proceedings. We're a meteorological corollary."

"Is it going to get any worse?" said the bow anchor, chained down to the deck, where he could only breathe once in five minutes.

"Not knowing, can't say. Wind may blow a bit by midnight. Thanks awfully. Good-by."

The wave that spoke so politely had travelled some distance aft, and got itself all mixed up on the deck amidships, which was a well deck sunk between high bulwarks. One of the bulwark plates, which was hung on hinges to open outward, had swung out, and passed the bulk of the water back to the sea again with a wop.

"Evidently that's what I'm made for," said the plate, shutting up again with a sputter of pride. "Oh, no, you don't, my friend!"

The top of a wave was trying to get in from outside, but the plate did not open in that direction, and the defeated water spurted back.

"Not bad for five-sixteenths of an inch," said the bulwark plate. "My work, I see, is laid down for the night;" and it began opening and shutting, as it was designed to do, with the motion of the ship.

"We are not what you might call idle," groaned all the frames together, as the "Dimbula" climbed a big wave, lay on her side at the top, and shot into the next hollow, twisting as she descended. A huge swell pushed up exactly under her middle, and her bow and stern hung free, with nothing to support them, and then one joking wave caught her up at the bow, and another at the stern, while the rest of the water fell away from under her, just to see how she would like it, and she was held up at the two ends, and the weight of the cargo and the machinery fell on the groaning iron keels and bilge stringers.

"Ease off! Ease off there!" roared the garboard strake. "I want an eighth of an inch play. D'you hear me, you young rivets!"

"Ease off! ease off!" cried the bilge stringers. "Don't hold us so tight to the frames!"

"Ease off!" grunted the deck beams, as the "Dimbula" rolled fearfully. "You've cramped our knees into the stringers and we can't move. Ease off, you flat-headed little nuisances."

Then two converging seas hit the bows, one on each side, and fell away in torrents of streaming thunder.