In spite of this meagre schooling however, the boy, by his self-reliance, resolute purpose, and good reading habits, acquired the very best sort of training for his future life. He had no books at his home, and, of course, there were but few to be had in that wild country from other homes. But among those he read over and over again, while a boy, were the Bible, “Æsop’s Fables,” “Robinson Crusoe,” “Pilgrim’s Progress,” “A History of the United States,” and Weems’s “Life of Washington,” all books of the right kind.
Lincoln Studying by Firelight.
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 before him until he could get paper. Then he would copy it, look at it, commit it to memory, and repeat it.”
When night came he would find a seat in the corner by the fireside, or stretch out at length on the floor in front of it, and by the firelight write, or work sums in arithmetic, on a wooden shovel, using a charred stick for a pencil. After covering the shovel, he would shave it off and use the surface over again.
The way in which he came to own a “Life of Washington” is interesting. Having borrowed the book, he took it to bed with him in the loft and read until his candle gave out. Then, before going to sleep, he tucked the book into a crevice of the logs in order that he might have it at hand as soon as daylight would permit him to read the next morning. But during the night a storm came up, and the rain beat in upon the book, wetting it through and through. With heavy heart Lincoln took it back to its owner, who gave it to him on condition that he would work three days to pay for it. Eagerly agreeing to do this, the boy carried his new possession home in triumph. This book had a marked influence over his future.
But his time for reading was limited, for until he was twenty his father hired him out to do all sorts of work, at which he sometimes earned six dollars a month and sometimes thirty-one cents a day. Money was always sorely needed in that household, the poor farm yielding only a small return for much hard work. For this reason, just before Abraham Lincoln came of age, his family, with all their possessions packed in a cart drawn by four oxen, moved again toward the West. For two weeks they travelled across the country into Illinois, and finally made a new home on the banks of the Sangamon River.
Lincoln Splitting Rails.
On reaching the end of the journey (in the spring of 1830), Abraham helped to build a log cabin and to clear ten acres of land for planting. This was the last work he did for his father, as he was now some months over twenty-one and was quite ready to go out into the world and work for himself. When he left his father’s house he had nothing, not even a good suit of clothes, and one of the first things he did was to split rails for enough brown jeans to make him a pair of trousers. As he was six feet four inches tall, three and one-half yards were needed! For these he split 1400 rails.