made every effort to master the rudiments of an education.

Sarah Bush in later life reported that Abe's father thought he wasted too much time over his books when out of school, but that she persuaded him to let the boy read and study at home, and that once reconciled to the unusual thing of a backwoods boy having a real hunger for books, the elder Lincoln encouraged the lad to apply himself to the tasks. So it came to be a rule in the house that when Abe was at his books he was not to be disturbed but left to read until he quit of his own accord.

Like Shakespeare, with his Horn Book and the Bible, Lincoln in his school days had very few books, but they were well worth while, the same Bible from which the poet of the purple page drank such deep drafts, a spelling book with its reading lessons culled from classic literature, and some lessons in arithmetic set down by the teacher. Few fountains, but clear and deep. And in them his thirst for knowledge found ever increasing satisfaction.

He was as fond of play and of rough and tumble sports as any of the other boys of the neighborhood. He was very much of a boy and liked to exercise a boy's privileges and prerogatives. He worked, too, swinging his ax with the woodsmen of experience. But his hunger for knowledge caused him often to seem to loiter at his tasks. He would stop work in the field to make a stump speech to the other workers or stretch himself on the grass to commit a bit of poetry to memory. This method of getting an education was so much a part of his nature that it continued throughout his life. When he was helping Offut to prepare a flat boat to carry produce to New Orleans, his employer complained of his stolen moments for study and charged him with being lazy.

"I can work," replied the gawky Abe. "My father taught me to work, but he did not teach me to love it."

Chapter IV
YOUTH

Y

OUNG ABRAHAM shot up toward physical manhood with such remarkable rapidity as to cause comment even among the group of frontiersmen who might look for sturdy development among children living altogether in the open. During his eleventh year he gained two inches in height. He grew continually tall and wiry until at the age of seventeen he stood six feet two in his stockings, if he had any, which is doubtful. Buckskin trousers, linsey-woolsey shirt, moccasins and a squirrel-skin cap were his continual wear from childhood. He was always grown out of his clothes so that his long arms and legs protruded far beyond the sleeves and legs of his garments. He had a bushy head of coal black hair, rugged features, deepset eyes, a large mouth, and big hands and feet. His physical strength was prodigious for a boy. He early learned to use it with skill in running and wrestling which made up most of the sports of the rural community.

But life within this awkward frame had a rhythmical urge and when it was stirred by emotion gave quickness, deftness and a certain wild grace to the otherwise uncouth figure. His nature was gentle and a hereditary melancholy gave a winning sadness to his features which was one of the most noticeable characteristics of his countenance.

Labor with small return is the lot of pioneers. About him the boy saw men and women slaving from daylight to dark at clearing the forest, or tilling the small bits of land reclaimed from the tangled skirts of wooded hillsides. With few tools and no instruction they worked out their problems of shelter, clothing and the culture of a wilderness. Constant use of those primitive tools made them expert in applying them to their necessities. The woodsman came finally to swing an ax with the accuracy of a practiced swordsman. He could fell a tree and leave no marks upon the separated trunk other than the one smooth wound, cut with the certainty and directness that marks the journey of a surgeon's knife. He could hew to the line, planks for his puncheon floor. His ax and he were inseparable, and the training of muscle and mind to the unison required for so many thousand skillful blows was an education on concentration, such as no college curriculum can supply.

Abraham learned all these things, not from instruction but from experience. He labored as the bee labors, or the ant, not from love of labor but from the urge of necessity. Labor became to him an element in the creation of a social scheme of things. It was as necessary as breathing to life. And so there came into his heart a realization of man's partnership with Nature in the fields of production; not faint and far away and shadowy, as it must have been, had his knowledge come from reading books alone, but direct and clear, like the stroke of his woodman's ax.

Such was the labor of the humble pioneer. Across the line from the state in which he lived were other states in which white men labored not at all; states in which labor was considered degrading and where it was done by slaves who saw no beauty or utility in it, but only an escape from punish

ment. Across that border, so close that their cocks and dogs might be mutually heard, white men rode in their carriages, or upon their trained horses, followed the hounds while their black slaves sweated to give them delicate food and rich raiment.

About the crackling log fire of his father's cabin on long winter nights young Lincoln heard stories of the splendor of those southern mansions; their pride and elegance, their worship of ancestry and their scorn of those of their own color who were born to toil and to bear the burden of existence. He heard in those recitals the echo of the blows of the lash upon the backs of human beings, and, as he afterwards said, realized even then that a man who could believe such things were not wrong must have a nature that could see the lash cut into the back of another without feeling it upon his own.

During these years his reading was enlarged by the addition of such books as" Robinson Crusoe," Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," a "History of the United States," and the "Life of Washington." A Louisville newspaper came into the neighborhood and this he scanned for reports of the world beyond his ken. He scanned the pages of his dog-eared "Arabian Nights" for the pleasure of journeys into the realm of the mythical and legendary.

The life of labor by white men around him with its drudgery and privations, its elements of actuality and individual independence, forced into his growing mind comparisons with that of slave labor. This, together with the clear statements of freedom and justice which enrich the pages of every book he is known to have had in his hands from childhood to maturity, were woven into the fibres of his being. The records tell of his passion for making addresses to his boy

playmates upon every possible occasion. Such an evidence of the urge of a boy's mind to utterance presages deep conviction, however crude their expression. Macaulay writing poetry at nine, and many other instances of such early desires of genius to express itself, go far toward giving us an understanding of Abraham Lincoln's mind at this time.

As a boy Lincoln recognized the dignity of free labor and the insult to his own nature of American slavery. The feeling of personal degradation from such an institution broadened and deepened with the years. He ever maintained a positive and unswerving attitude toward the right of every man to the bread which is the product of his own labor. The whole subject is thrown into one compact sentence in one of his replies to Douglas who suggested that Lincoln proposed a social equality of the races.

"I agree with Judge Douglas," he said, "that he (the Negro) is not my equal in many respects-certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral and intellectual endowments. But in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his hands earn, he is my equal, and the equal of Judge Douglass, and the equal of every living man.'

The question of labor as a political issue was not up in Lincoln's time, as it has been since and as it is now, when it is rapidly becoming the one mighty question, not only of our country but of the whole world. Fundamentally Lincoln. founded his whole principle of the rights of man on labor. He said plainly on two public occasions that, "Inasmuch as most good things are produced by labor, it follows that all such things ought to belong to those whose labor has produced them. But it has happened in all ages of the world that some have labored, and others, without labor, have enjoyed a large portion of the fruits. This is wrong and should