family, either on his father's
clearing, or hired out to other farmers to plough, or dig ditches, or
chop wood, or drive ox teams; occasionally also to "tend the baby,"
when the farmer's wife was otherwise engaged. He could regard it as an
advancement to a higher sphere of activity when he obtained work in a
"crossroads store," where he amused the customers by his talk over the
counter; for he soon distinguished himself among the backwoods folk
as one who had something to say worth listening to. To win that
distinction, he had to draw mainly upon his wits; for, while his thirst
for knowledge was great, his opportunities for satisfying that thirst
were wofully slender.

In the log schoolhouse, which he could visit but little, he was taught
only reading, writing, and elementary arithmetic. Among the people
of the settlement, bush farmers and small tradesmen, he found none of
uncommon intelligence or education; but some of them had a few books,
which he borrowed eagerly. Thus he read and reread, AEsop's Fables,
learning to tell stories with a point and to argue by parables; he read
Robinson Crusoe, The Pilgrim's Progress, a short history of the United
States, and Weems's Life of Washington. To the town constable's he went
to read the Revised Statutes of Indiana. Every printed page that fell
into his hands he would greedily devour, and his family and friends
watched him with wonder, as the uncouth boy, after his daily work,
crouched in a corner of the log cabin or outside under a tree, absorbed
in a book while munching his supper of corn bread. In this manner he
began to gather some knowledge, and sometimes he would astonish the
girls with such startling remarks as that the earth was moving around
the sun, and not the sun around the earth, and they marvelled where
"Abe" could have got such queer notions. Soon he also felt the impulse
to write; not only making extracts from books he wished to remember, but
also composing little essays of his own. First he sketched these with
charcoal on a wooden shovel scraped white with a drawing-knife, or on
basswood shingles. Then he transferred them to paper, which was a scarce
commodity in the Lincoln household; taking care to cut his expressions
close, so that they might not cover too much space,--a style-forming
method greatly to be commended. Seeing boys put a burning coal on the
back of a wood turtle, he was moved to write on cruelty to animals.
Seeing men intoxicated with whiskey,