ool he learned to read and write a little, but after
a while he found a new teacher, that was--himself. When the rest of
the family had gone to bed, he would sit up and read his favorite
books by the light of the great blazing logs heaped up on the open
fire. He had not more than half a dozen books in all. They were
"Robinson Crusoe," "Pilgrim's Progress," AEsop's[4] Fables, the
Bible, a Life of Washington, and a small History of the United States.
The boy read these books over and over till he knew a great deal of
them by heart and could repeat whole pages from them.

[Illustration: WRITING BY THE FIRE.]

Part of his evenings he spent in writing and ciphering. Thomas
Lincoln was so poor that he could seldom afford to buy paper and pens
for his son, so the boy had to get on without them. He used to take
the back of the broad wooden fire-shovel to write on and a piece of
charcoal for a pencil. When he had covered the shovel with words or
with sums in arithmetic, he would shave it off clean and begin over
again. If "Abe's" father complained that the shovel was getting thin,
the boy would go out into the woods, cut down a tree, and make a new
one; for as long as the woods lasted, fire-shovels and furniture were
cheap.

[Footnote 4: AEsop (E'sop): the name of a noted writer of fables.
Here is one of AEsop's fables: An old frog thought that he could blow
himself up to be as big as an ox. So he drew in his breath and puffed
himself out prodigiously. "Am I big enough now?" he asked his son.
"No," said his son; "you don't begin to be as big as an ox yet." Then
he tried again, and swelled himself out still more. "How's that?"
he asked. "Oh, it's no use trying," said his son, "you can't do it."
"But I will," said the old frog. With that he drew in his breath with
all his might and puffed himself up to such an enormous size that
he suddenly burst.

Moral: Don't try to be bigger than you can.]

248. What Lincoln could do at seventeen; what he was at nineteen;
his strength.--By the time the lad was seventeen he could write a
good hand, do hard examples in long division, and spell better than
any one else in the county. Once in a while he wrote a little piece
of his own about something which interested him; when the neighbors
heard it read, they would say, "The world can't beat it."

At nineteen Abraham Lincoln had reached his full height. He stood
nearly six feet four inches, barefooted. He was a kind of
good-natured giant