step-mother put it,
"began to look a little human." He was not an attractive object, even at
best, for he was lanky and clumsy, with great hands and feet, and a
skin prematurely wrinkled and shrivelled. By the time he was seventeen,
he was six feet tall, and he soon added two more inches to his stature.
Needless to say, his clothes never caught up with him, but were always
too small.

His schooling was of the most meagre description; in fact, in his whole
life, he went to school less than one year. Yet there soon awakened
within the boy a trace of unusual spirit. He actually liked to read. He
saw few books, but such as he could lay his hands on, he read over and
over. That one fact alone set him apart at once from the other boys of
his class. To them reading was an irksome labor.

All this reading had its effect. He acquired a vocabulary. That is to
say, instead of the few hundred words which were all the other boys knew
by which to express their thoughts, he soon had twice as many; besides
that, he soon got a reputation as a wit and story-teller, and his
command of words made him fond of speechmaking. He resembled most boys
in liking to "show off." He had learned, too, that there were comforts
in the world which he need never look for in his father's house, and so,
as soon as he was of age, he left that unattractive dwelling-place and
struck out for himself, making a livelihood in various ways--by
splitting rails, running a river boat, managing a store, enlisting for
the Black Hawk war--doing anything, in a word, that came to hand and
would serve to put a little money in his pocket. He came to know a great
many people and so, in 1832, he proclaimed himself a candidate for the
state legislature for Sangamon County, Illinois, where he had made his
home for some years. No doubt to most people, his candidacy must have
seemed in the nature of a joke, and though he stumped the county
thoroughly and entertained the crowds with his stories and flashes of
wit, he was defeated at the polls.

That episode ended, he returned to store-keeping; but he had come to see
that the law was the surest road to political preferment, and so he
spent such leisure as he had in study, and in 1836 was admitted to the
bar. As has been remarked before, the requirements for admission were
anything but prohibitory, most lawyers sharing the oft-quoted opinion of
Patrick Henry that the only way to learn law was to practise it. Lincoln
decided to est