ears old, with a flat slab of wood and a
stick which he burned at one end till it was charred; then he formed
letters with it on the wood. In that way he taught himself to write. His
mother had three books, a Bible, a catechism, and a spelling-book. He
had never had any boy playmate and was greatly excited when an aunt and
uncle of his mother's, Mr. and Mrs. Sparrow, with a nephew, named Dennis
Hanks, arrived at the creek and lived in a half-faced camp near by.
Dennis and Abraham became fast friends.

A fever swept the country, and Abraham's mother died. Three years later
his father married a new wife. The second Mrs. Lincoln had been married
before and had three children, a boy and two girls. So there were five
children to play together. Mr. Lincoln had built a better cabin, and she
brought such furniture as the Lincoln children had never seen. Their
eyes opened wide at the sight of real chairs and tables. She made
Abraham and Sarah pretty new clothes. They had neat, comfortable beds,
and the two sets of children were very happy. Mrs. Lincoln loved Abraham
and saw that there was the making of a smart man in him. She helped him
study, and when there was school for a short time in a distant log hut,
she sent Abraham every day. When the school ended, there were four years
when there was no school anywhere near their settlement, so she read
with Abraham and kept him at his lessons in reading and arithmetic all
that time.

Hunters and traders rode that way sometimes, and if a traveler had a
book about him, Abraham was sure to get a look at it.

A new settler had a _Life of Washington_. Abraham looked at the book
hungrily for weeks and finally worked up courage to ask the loan of it.
He promised to take good care of it. He was then earning money to give
his parents by chopping down trees in the forests, and he had no time to
read but in the evenings. One night the rain soaked through the cracks
of the cabin, and the precious book that he had promised to take good
care of was stained on every page. What was he to do? He had no money to
pay for the book, but he hurried to the settler's cabin and told him
what had happened. He offered to work in the cornfield for three days to
pay Mr. Crawford for the loss of the book. It was heavy work, but he did
it and, in the end, owned the stained _Life of Washington_, himself.

Abraham had a fine memory. He could repeat almost the whole of a sermon,
a speech, or a story that he had hap