McClures Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 | Page 5

any "fire-water" at the tavern or the grocery. If a
tavern-keeper violated the law, two-thirds of the fine assessed against
him went to the poor people of the county. The Rutledge tavern was the
only one at New Salem of which we have any authentic account. It was
kept by others besides Mr. Rutledge; for a time by Henry Onstott the
cooper, and then by Nelson Alley, and possibly there were other
landlords; but nothing can be more certain than that Lincoln was not
one of them. The few surviving inhabitants of the vanished village, and
of the country round about, have a clear recollection of Berry and
Lincoln's store--of how it looked, and of what things were sold in it; but
not one has been found with the faintest remembrance of a tavern kept
by Lincoln, or by Berry, or by both. Stage passengers jolting into New
Salem sixty-two years ago must, if Lincoln was an inn-keeper, have
partaken of his hospitality by the score; but if they did, they all died
many, many years ago, or have all maintained an unaccountable and
most perplexing silence.--_J. McCan Davis._]
"'Your last suggestion,' said Mr. Lincoln, 'carries with it greater weight
than anything Mr. Hackett suggested, but the first is no reason at all;'

and after reading another passage, he said, 'This is not withheld, and
where it passes current there can be no reason for withholding the
other.'... And, as if feeling the impropriety of preferring the player to
the parson, [there was a clergyman in the room] he turned to the
chaplain and said: 'From your calling it is probable that you do not
know that the acting plays which people crowd to hear are not always
those planned by their reputed authors. Thus, take the stage edition of
"Richard III." It opens with a passage from "Henry VI.," after which
come portions of "Richard III.," then another scene from "Henry VI.,"
and the finest soliloquy in the play, if we may judge from the many
quotations it furnishes, and the frequency with which it is heard in
amateur exhibitions, was never seen by Shakespeare, but was
written--was it not, Mr. McDonough?--after his death, by Colley
Cibber."
"Having disposed, for the present, of questions relating to the stage
editions of the plays, he recurred to his standard copy, and, to the
evident surprise of Mr. McDonough, read or repeated from memory
extracts from several of the plays, some of which embraced a number
of lines.
"It must not be supposed that Mr. Lincoln's poetical studies had been
confined to his plays. He interspersed his remarks with extracts striking
from their similarity to, or contrast with, something of Shakespeare's,
from Byron, Rogers, Campbell, Moore, and other English poets."[1]
[Illustration: BERRY AND LINCOLN'S STORE IN 1895.
From a recent photograph by C.S. McCullough, Petersburg, Illinois.
The little frame store-building occupied by Berry and Lincoln at New
Salem is now standing at Petersburg, Illinois, in the rear of L.W.
Bishop's gun-shop. Its history after 1834 is somewhat obscure, but
there is no reason for doubting its identity. According to tradition it was
bought by Robert Bishop, the father of the present owner, about 1835,
from Mr. Lincoln himself; but it is difficult to reconcile this legend
with the sale of the store to the Trent brothers, unless, upon the flight of
the latter from the country and the closing of the store, the building,
through the leniency of creditors, was allowed to revert to Mr. Lincoln,
in which event he no doubt sold it at the first opportunity and applied
the proceeds to the payment of the debts of the firm. When Mr. Bishop
bought the store building, he removed it to Petersburg. It is said that the

removal was made in part by Lincoln himself; that the job was first
undertaken by one of the Bales, but that, encountering some difficulty,
he called upon Lincoln to assist him, which Lincoln did. The structure
was first set up adjacent to Mr. Bishop's house, and converted into a
gun-shop. Later it was removed to a place on the public square; and
soon after the breaking out of the late war, Mr. Bishop, erecting a new
building, pushed Lincoln's store into the back-yard, and there it still
stands. Soon after the assassination of Mr. Lincoln, the front door was
presented to some one in Springfield, and has long since been lost sight
of. It is remembered by Mr. Bishop that in this door there was an
opening for the reception of letters--a circumstance of importance as
tending to establish the genuineness of the building, when it is
remembered that Lincoln was postmaster while he kept the store. The
structure, as it stands to-day, is about eighteen feet long, twelve feet in
width, and ten feet in