ndards a life of hardship. There was food sufficient, if not
very good; protection from wind and weather; fire in the winter time;
steady labor; and social acceptance by the community of the creekside.
That the labor was hard and long, went without saying. But as to
that--as of the whippings in Kentucky--what else, from the peasant point
of view, would you expect? Abraham took it all with the same stoicism
with which he had once taken the whippings. By the unwritten law of the
creekside he was his father's property, and so was his labor, until
he came of age. Thomas used him as a servant or hired him out to
other farmers. Stray recollections show us young Abraham working as
a farm-hand for twenty-five cents the day, probably with "keep" in
addition; we glimpse him slaughtering hogs skilfully at thirty-one cents
a day, for this was "rough work." He became noted as an axman.

In the crevices, so to speak, of his career as a farm-hand, Abraham got
a few months of schooling, less than a year in all. A story that has
been repeated a thousand times shows the raw youth by the cabin fire
at night doing sums on the back of a wooden shovel, and shaving off its
surface repeatedly to get a fresh page. He devoured every book that came
his way, only a few to be sure, but generally great ones--the Bible,
of course, and Aesop, Crusoe, Pilgrim's Progress, and a few histories,
these last unfortunately of the poorer sort. He early displayed a bent
for composition, scribbling verses that were very poor, and writing
burlesque tales about his acquaintances in what passed for a Biblical
style.(2)

One great experience broke the monotony of the life on Pigeon Creek.
He made a trip to New Orleans as a "hand" on a flatboat. Of this trip
little is known though much may be surmised. To his deeply poetic nature
what an experience it must have been: the majesty of the vast river; the
pageant of its immense travel; the steamers heavily laden; the fleets of
barges; the many towns; the nights of stars over wide sweeps of water;
the stately plantation houses along the banks; the old French city with
its crowds, its bells, the shipping, the strange faces and the foreign
speech; all the bewildering evidence that there were other worlds
besides Pigeon Creek!

What seed of new thinking was sown in his imagination by this Odyssey
we shall never know. The obvious effect in the ten years of his life
in Indiana was produced at Pigeon Creek. The "settlement" w