The Lincoln Story Book | Page 4

she had been enjoined not to
follow her brother. "What are you going to tell her about getting hurt?"
"Tell her I did it with the ax," she replied. "That will be the truth?" she
questioned, with the prevarication of her sex inborn.
"Yes, that's the truth, but it is not all the truth. You tell the whole truth."
The mother was forgiving, and nothing more came of the casualty.
* * * * *
LINCOLN'S WEDDING-SONG.
Abraham Lincoln's own sister Sarah married one Aaron Grigsby, a man
in the settlers' line of life; and Abraham, a youth under age, composed
an epithalamium on the occasion. The title was "Adam and Eve's
Wedding-Song," and the principal verses are given to show what
roughness pervaded the home on the frontier:

The woman was not taken from Adam's feet, we see, So we must not
abuse her, the meaning seems to be. The woman was not taken from
Adam's head, we know; To show she must not rule him--'tis evidently
so. The woman, she was taken from under Adam's arm, So she must be
protected from injuries and harm.
* * * * *
"RISK THE HOGS AND I WILL RISK MYSELF!"
At the age of seventeen, Lincoln, the strongest and "longest" younker
of the neighborhood, was let out by his father for six dollars a month
and board to a James Taylor, ferryman of Anderson's Creek and the
Ohio River. He was also expected to do the farmwork and other jobs, as
well as the chores in and about the house. This included tending to the
baby--the good wives uniting to pronounce Abe the best of helps as "so
handy," as Mrs. Toodles would say.
He had attained his fixed height, exactly six feet three inches. (This is
his own record.) He really did, with his unusual strength, more than any
man's stint, and failing to gain full man's wages, whether it was his
father or he handled it, he felt the injustice, which soured him on that
point. He enraged his employer's son by sitting up late to read, so that
the young man struck him to silence. But the young giant refused from
retaliating in kind, whether from natural magnanimity belonging to
giants, or from respect for the "young master," or from
self-acknowledgment that he was in the wrong. He learned the craft of
river boatman in this engagement. One day, on being asked to kill a
hog, he replied like the Irishman with the violin, "that he had never
done it, but he would try."
"If you will risk the hog," he said, "I will risk myself!"
Becoming hog-slaughterer added this branch occupation to the many of
"the man of all work." Taylor sub-let him out in this capacity for thirty
cents a day, saying:
"Abe will do any one thing about as well as another."
* * * * *
THE REST WAS VILE.
The Lincoln homestead in Indiana, in 1820-23, had at the first the
primitive corn-mill in the Indian fashion--a burnt-out block with a
pounder rigged to a well-sweep. A water-mill being set up ten miles off,
on Anderson's Creek, that was superseded, as improvement marched,

by a horse-power one. To this Lincoln, as a lad of sixteen or seventeen,
would carry the corn in a bag upon an old flea-bitten gray mare. One
day, on unhitching the animal and loading it, and running his arm
through the head-gear loop to lead, he had no sooner struck it and cried
"Get up, you de----," when the beast whirled around, and, lashing out,
kicked him in the forehead so that he fell to the ground insensible. The
miller, Hoffman, ran out and carried the youth indoors, sending for his
father, as he feared the victim would not revive. He did not do so until
hours after having been carried home. When conscious, his faculties, as
psychologically ordained, resumed operations from the instant of
suspension, and he uttered the sequel to his outcry:
"----vil!"
Lincoln's own explanation is thus:
"Just before I struck the mare, my will, through the mind, had set the
muscles of my tongue to utter the expression, and when her heels came
in contact with my head, the whole thing stopped half-cocked, as it
were, and was only fired off when mental energy or force returned."
His friends interpreted the occurrence as a proof of his always finishing
what he commenced.
* * * * *
"NO HEAPING COALS OF FIRE ON THAT HEAD."
The wantonly cruel experiment of testing the sensitiveness in reptiles
armored, passed into a proverb out West in pioneer times. Besides
carving initials and dates on the shell of land tortoises, boys would
fling the creatures against tree or rock to see it perish with its exposed
and lacerated body, or