ure in hunting. Almost
every youth of the backwoods early became an excellent shot and a
confirmed sportsman. The woods still swarmed with game, and every cabin
depended largely upon this for its supply of food. But to his strength
was added a gentleness which made him shrink from killing or inflicting
pain, and the time the other boys gave to lying in ambush, he preferred
to spend in reading or in efforts at improving his mind.

Only twice during his life in Indiana was the routine of his employment
changed. When he was about sixteen years old he worked for a time for a
man who lived at the mouth of Anderson's Creek, and here part of his
duty was to manage a ferry-boat which carried passengers across the Ohio
River. It was very likely this experience which, three years later,
brought him another. Mr. Gentry, the chief man of the village of
Gentryville that had grown up a mile or so from his father's cabin,
loaded a flatboat on the Ohio River with the produce his store had
collected--corn, flour, pork, bacon, and other miscellaneous
provisions--and putting it in charge of his son Allen Gentry and of
Abraham Lincoln, sent them with it down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers,
to sell its cargo at the plantations of the lower Mississippi, where
sugar and cotton were the principal crops, and where other food supplies
were needed to feed the slaves. No better proof is needed of the
reputation for strength, skill, honesty, and intelligence that this tall
country boy had already won for himself, than that he was chosen to
navigate the flatboat a thousand miles to the "sugar-coast" of the
Mississippi River, sell its load, and bring back the money. Allen Gentry
was supposed to be in command, but from the record of his after life we
may be sure that Abraham did his full share both of work and management.
The elder Gentry paid Lincoln eight dollars a month and his passage home
on a steamboat for this service. The voyage was made successfully,
although not without adventure; for one night, after the boat was tied
up to the shore, the boys were attacked by seven negroes, who came
aboard intending to kill and rob him. There was a lively scrimmage, in
which, though slightly hurt, they managed to beat off their assailants,
and then, hastily cutting their boat adrift, swung out on the stream.
The marauding band little dreamed that they were attacking the man who
in after years was to give their race its freedom; and though the future
was e