into a new log cabin which
had four sides to it. They seem to have made a new set of furniture
for the new house. "Abe's" father got a large log, split it in two,
smoothed off the flat side, bored holes in the under side and drove
in four stout sticks for legs: that made the table. They had no
chairs,--it would have been too much trouble to make the backs,--but
they had three-legged stools, which Thomas Lincoln made with an axe,
just as he did the table; perhaps "Abe" helped him drive in the legs.

[Illustration: HOME-MADE FURNITURE.]

In one corner of the loft of this cabin the boy had a big bag of dry
leaves for his bed. Whenever he felt like having a new bed, all that
he had to do was to go out in the woods and gather more leaves.

He worked about the place during the day, helping his father and
mother. For his supper he had a piece of cornbread. After he had eaten
it, he climbed up to his loft in the dark, by a kind of ladder of
wooden pins driven into the logs. Five minutes after that he was fast
asleep on his bed of sweet-smelling leaves, and was dreaming of
hunting coons, or of building big bonfires out of brush.[3]

[Footnote 3: Brush: bushes and limbs of trees.]

246. Death of "Abe's" mother; the lonely grave in the woods; what
Abraham Lincoln said of his mother after he had grown to be a man;
what "Abe's" new mother said of him.--"Abe's" mother was not strong,
and before they had been in their new log cabin a year she fell sick
and died. She was buried on the farm. "Abe" used to go out and sit
by her lonely grave in the forest and cry. It was the first great
sorrow that had ever touched the boy's heart. After he had grown to
be a man, he said with eyes full of tears to a friend with whom he
was talking: "God bless my mother; all that I am or ever hope to be
I owe to her."

[Illustration: "ABE" LEARNING TO USE HIS AXE.]

At the end of a year Thomas Lincoln married again. The new wife that
he brought home was a kind-hearted and excellent woman. She did all
she could to make the poor, ragged, barefooted boy happy. After he
had grown up and become famous, she said: "Abe never gave me a cross
word or look, and never refused to do anything I asked him: Abe was
the best boy I ever saw."

247. The school in the woods; the new teacher; reading by the open
fire; how "Abe" used the fire-shovel.--There was a log schoolhouse
in the woods quite a distance off, and there "Abe" went for a short
time. At the sch