to be among the necessaries of life. By what magic Thomas Lincoln had persuaded this thrifty and "forehanded" widow to leave her home in Kentucky and migrate to the comfortless wilderness of Indiana, we can only guess. But Thomas was of a genial and even jovial disposition, and he had allured the good woman to come and save his motherless bairns from utter destitution and neglect.

The new Mrs. Lincoln, if she was disappointed in the home she found in Indiana, never showed her disappointment to her stepchildren. She took hold of the duties and labors of the day with a cheerful readiness that was long and gratefully remembered by her stepson, at least. They were good friends at once. Of him she said, years after, "He never gave me a cross word or look, and never refused, in fact or appearance, to do anything I requested of him." Of her he said, She was a noble woman, affectionate, good, and kind, rather above the average woman, as I remember women in those days."

Mrs. Lincoln brought with her three children by her first marriage, John, Sarah, and Matilda Johnston, whose ages were not far from those of the three children found in the Lincoln homestead. The log cabin was full to overflowing. The three boys, Abraham Lincoln, John Johnston, and Dennis Hanks, were sent to the loft over the cabin to sleep. They climbed up a rude ladder built against the inner side of the log house; and their bed, a mere sack of dry corn-husks, was so narrow that when one turned over all three turned. Nevertheless, there was an abundance of covering for the children.

The new mother had at once insisted that the openings in the cabin should be filled with glass and sashes

instead of loosely hung sheets of muslin. The rickety frame that had served as a door, with its clumsy wooden hasp, was taken away, and a battened door" of matched boards, with a wooden latch of domestic make, replaced it. Mats of deerskin were put down on the puncheon floor, and an aspect of comfort, even luxury, was spread around. It seems to have been an harmonious household. If there were any family jars, history makes no mention of them. And we must remember that that history has come down to us in the reports of two of those who were most interested in the household, Abraham Lincoln and his stepmother.

About this time, young Abe made the acquaintance of a new source of pleasure, James Fenimore Cooper's "Leather-Stocking Tales." Over these he hung with rapturous delight. He had seen something of the fastreceding Indian of the American forests; and he had heard, many a time, of his father's thrilling escape from the red man's clutches, and of his grandfather's cruel death in the Kentucky "clearing"; and when he withdrew his fascinated attention from the vivid pages of Cooper's novels, he almost expected to see the painted savages lurking in the outskirts of the forest so near at hand. Another book, borrowed from one of the few and distant neighbors, was Burns's Poems, a thick and chunky volume, as he afterwards described it, bound in leather and printed in very small type. This book he kept long enough to commit to memory almost all its contents. And ever after, to the day of his death, some of the familiar lines of the Scottish poet were as ready on his lips as those of Shakespeare, the only poet who was, in Lincoln's opinion, greater than Robert Burns.

His stepmother said of him: "He read everything

he could lay his hands on, and when he came across a passage that struck him, he would write it down on boards, if he had no paper, and keep it by him until he could get paper. Then he would copy it, look at it, commit it to memory, and repeat it." Thus from books that he did not own and could not keep, he collected a great many things of the utmost value to him.

But although young Lincoln devoured books with a hunger that was almost pathetic, and sorely tried his eyes with study by the light of blazing pine-knots on the hearth, he was no milksop, no weakly bookworm. He had learned the use of tools; he could swing the maul, and could chip out "shakes" and shingles, lay open rails, and handle logs as well as most men. Although not a quarrelsome boy, he could throw any of his weight and years in the neighborhood; and far and near Abe Lincoln was early known as a capital wrestler and a tough champion at every game of

muscular skill.

School and its coveted facilities for getting knowledge was now within reach. Hazel Dorsey was the name of the new schoolmaster on Little Pigeon Creek, a mile and a half from the Lincoln homestead; and thither was sent the brood of young ones belonging to the Lincoln family. These backwoods children had the unusual luxury of going all together to a genuine school. True the schoolhouse was built of logs; but all the youngsters of the school came from log cabins; and even the new meeting-house, which was an imposing affair for those woods, was log-built up to the gables, and thence finished out with the first sawn lumber ever used to any considerable extent in the region.

Young Abraham made the most of his opportunities,