“Well,” replied he, “I was about eighteen years of age, and belonged, as you know, to what they call down south the ‘scrubs’; people who do not own land and slaves are nobodies there; but we had succeeded in raising, chiefly by my labor, sufficient produce, as I thought, to justify me in taking it down the river to sell.  After much persuasion I had got the consent of my mother to go, and had constructed a flatboat large enough to take the few barrels of things we had gathered to New Orleans.  A steamer was going down the river.  We have, you know, no wharves on the western streams, and the custom was, if passengers were at any of the landings, they were to go out in a boat, the steamer stopping and taking them on board.  I was contemplating my new boat, and wondering whether I could make it stronger or improve it in any part, when two men with trunks came down to the shore in carriages, and looking at the different boats singled out mine, and asked, ‘Who owns this?’ I answered modestly, ‘I do.’  ’Will you,’ said one of them, ‘take us and our trunks to the steamer?’ ‘Certainly,’ said I. I was very glad to have the chance of earning something, and supposed that each of them would give me a couple of bits.  The trunks were put in my boat, the passengers seated themselves on them, and I sculled them out to the steamer.  They got on board, and I lifted the trunks and put them on the deck.  The steamer was about to put on steam again, when I called out, ‘You have forgotten to pay me.’  Each of them took from his pocket a silver half-dollar and threw it on the bottom of my boat.  I could scarcely believe my eyes as I picked up the money.  You may think it was a very little thing, and in these days it seems to me like a trifle, but it was a most important incident in my life.  I could scarcely credit that I, the poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day; that by honest work I had earned a dollar.  I was a more hopeful and thoughtful boy from that time.”

In March, 1828, Lincoln was employed by one of the leading men of Gentryville to take a load of produce down the Mississippi River to New Orleans.  For this service he was paid eight dollars a month and his rations.

This visit to New Orleans was a great event in his life.  It showed him the life of a busy cosmopolitan city, which was a perfect wonderland to him.  Everything he saw aroused his astonishment and interest, and served to educate him for the larger life on which he was to enter later.

The next important event in the history of the Lincoln family was their removal from Indiana to Illinois in 1830.  The farm in Indiana had not prospered as they hoped it would,—­hence the removal to new ground in Illinois.  Abraham drove the team of oxen which carried their household goods from the old home to their new abiding place near Decatur, in Macon County, Illinois.  Driving over the muddy, ill-made roads with a heavily laden team was hard and slow work, and the journey occupied a fortnight.  When they arrived at their destination, Lincoln again helped to build a log cabin for the family home.  With his stepbrother he also, as he said himself, “made sufficient of rails to fence ten acres of ground, and raised a crop of sown corn upon it the same year.”