make his childhood hopeful and happy. No man ever honored women
more truly than did Abraham Lincoln; while all the qualities that
caused men to like him--his strength, his ambition, his
kindliness--served equally to make him a favorite with them. In
the years of his young manhood three women greatly occupied his
thoughts. The first was the slender, fair-haired Ann Rutledge,
whom he very likely saw for the first time as she stood with the
group of mocking people on the river-bank, near her father's
mill, the day Lincoln's flatboat stuck on the dam at New Salem.
It was her death, two years before he went to live at
Springfield, that brought on the first attack of melancholy of
which we know, causing him such deep grief that for a time his
friends feared his sorrow might drive him insane.

Another friend was Mary Owens, a Kentucky girl, very different
from the gentle, blue-eyed Ann Rutledge, but worthy in every way
of a man's affections. She had visited her sister in New Salem
several years before, and Lincoln remembered her as a tall,
handsome, well-educated young woman, who could be serious as well
as gay, and who was considered wealthy. In the autumn of 1836,
her sister, Mrs. Able, then about to start on a visit to
Kentucky, jokingly offered to bring Mary back if Lincoln would
promise to marry her. He, also in jest, agreed to do so. Much to
his astonishment, he learned, a few months later, that she had
actually returned with Mrs. Able, and his sensitive conscience
made him feel that the jest had turned into real earnest, and
that he was in duty bound to keep his promise if she wished him
to do so. They had both changed since they last met; neither
proved quite pleasing to the other, yet an odd sort of courtship
was kept up, until, some time after Lincoln went to live in