Page:Samuel Scoville -Abraham Lincoln, His Story.djvu/32

 At length came a chance to secure an appointment as deputy state surveyor. The only difficulty was that Lincoln knew absolutely nothing about surveying. He borrowed a textbook and, with the help of a schoolmaster friend, worked night and day for six weeks. At the end of that time, pale and haggard but a master of surveying, he got the job.

It was about this time that he fell in love with the beautiful Ann Rutledge, who died soon after they became engaged. "My heart is buried there," he said to a friend when they once passed her grave. There is no doubt that Lincoln was a changed man after her death and that her loss deepened his life. This thought has been nobly phased by Edgar Lee Masters in the epitaph which he has written for her almost unmarked grave:

In 1834 Lincoln was elected to the state