The Writings of Abraham Lincoln, vol 1 | Page 7

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, he wrote
on temperance. In verse-making, too, he tried himself, and in satire on
persons offensive to him or others,--satire the rustic wit of which was
not always fit for ears polite. Also political thoughts he put upon paper,
and some of his pieces were even deemed good enough for publication
in the county weekly.
Thus he won a neighborhood reputation as a clever young man, which
he increased by his performances as a speaker, not seldom drawing
upon himself the dissatisfaction of his employers by mounting a stump
in the field, and keeping the farm hands from their work by little
speeches in a jocose and sometimes also a serious vein. At the rude
social frolics of the settlement he became an important person, telling
funny, stories, mimicking the itinerant preachers who had happened to
pass by, and making his mark at wrestling matches, too; for at the age

of seventeen he had attained his full height, six feet four inches in his
stockings, if he had any, and a terribly muscular clodhopper he was.
But he was known never to use his extraordinary strength to the injury
or humiliation of others; rather to do them a kindly turn, or to enforce
justice and fair dealing between them. All this made him a favorite in
backwoods society, although in some things he appeared a little odd, to
his friends. Far more than any of them, he was given not only to
reading, but to fits of abstraction, to quiet musing with himself, and
also to strange spells of melancholy, from which he often would pass in
a moment to rollicking outbursts of droll humor. But on the whole he
was one of the people among whom he lived; in appearance perhaps
even a little more uncouth than most of them,--a very tall, rawboned
youth, with large features, dark, shrivelled skin, and rebellious hair; his
arms and legs long, out of proportion; clad in deerskin trousers, which
from frequent exposure to the rain had shrunk so as to sit tightly on his
limbs, leaving several inches of bluish shin exposed between their
lower end and the heavy tan-colored shoes; the nether garment held
usually by only one suspender, that was strung over a coarse
homemade shirt; the head covered in winter with a coonskin cap, in
summer with a rough straw hat of uncertain shape, without a band.
It is doubtful whether he felt himself much superior to his surroundings,
although he confessed to a yearning for some knowledge of the world
outside of the circle in which he lived. This wish was gratified; but how?
At the age of nineteen he went down the Mississippi to New Orleans as
a flatboat hand, temporarily joining a trade many members of which at
that time still took pride in being called "half horse and half