s and back every day will be just about enough for you
to walk to keep your legs limber."

The tactful wife accomplished it somehow and Abe started off to school
with Nancy, and a light heart. A neighbor described him as he appeared
in Crawford's school, as "long, wiry and strong, while his big feet and
hands, and the length of his legs and arms, were out of all proportion
to his small trunk and head. His complexion was swarthy, and his skin
shriveled and yellow even then. He wore low shoes, buckskin breeches,
linsey-woolsey shirt, and a coonskin cap. The breeches hung close to his
legs, but were far from meeting the tops of his shoes, exposing 'twelve
inches of shinbone, sharp, blue and narrow.'"

"Yet," said Nat Grigsby, "he was always in good health, never sick, and
had an excellent constitution."

HELPING KATE ROBY SPELL

Andrew Crawford must have been an unusual man, for he tried to teach
"manners" in his backwoods school! Spelling was considered a great
accomplishment. Abe shone as a speller in school and at the
spelling-matches. One day, evidently during a period when young Lincoln
was kept from school to do some outside work for his father, he appeared
at the window when the class in spelling was on the floor. The word
"defied" was given out and several pupils had misspelled it. Kate Roby,
the pretty girl of the village, was stammering over it. "D-e-f," said
Kate, then she hesitated over the next letter. Abe pointed to his eye
and winked significantly. The girl took the hint and went on glibly
"i-e-d," and "went up head."

"I DID IT!"

There was a buck's head nailed over the school house door. It proved a
temptation to young Lincoln, who was tall enough to reach it easily. One
day the schoolmaster discovered that one horn was broken and he demanded
to know who had done the damage. There was silence and a general denial
till Abe spoke up sturdily:

"I did it. I did not mean to do it, but I hung on it--and it broke!"
The other boys thought Abe was foolish to "own up" till he had to--but
that was his way.

It is doubtful if Abe Lincoln owned an arithmetic. He had a copybook,
made by himself, in which he entered tables of weights and measures and
"sums" he had to do. Among these was a specimen of schoolboy doggerel:

"Abraham Lincoln,
His hand and pen,
He will be good--
But God knows when!"

In another place he wrote some solemn reflections on the value of tim