rown somewhat in the telling. Mr.
Richardson declared that the young man could carry as heavy a load as
"three ordinary men." He saw Abe pick up and walk away with "a chicken
house, made up of poles pinned together, and covered, that weighed at
least six hundred if not much more."

When the Richardsons were building their corn-crib, Abe saw three or
four men getting ready to carry several huge posts or timbers on
"sticks" between them. Watching his chance, he coolly stepped in,
shouldered all the timbers at once and walked off alone with them,
carrying them to the place desired. He performed these feats off-hand,
smiling down in undisguised pleasure as the men around him expressed
their amazement. It seemed to appeal to his sense of humor as well as
his desire to help others out of their difficulties.

Another neighbor, "old Mr. Wood," said of Abe: "He could strike, with a
maul, a heavier blow than any other man. He could sink an ax deeper
into wood than any man I ever saw."

Dennis Hanks used to tell that if you heard Abe working in the woods
alone, felling trees, you would think three men, at least, were at work
there--the trees came crashing down so fast.

On one occasion after he had been threshing wheat for Mr. Turnham, the
farmer-constable whose "Revised Statutes of Indiana" Abe had devoured,
Lincoln was walking back, late at night from Gentryville, where he and a
number of cronies had spent the evening. As the youths were picking
their way along the frozen road, they saw a dark object on the ground by
the roadside. They found it to be an old sot they knew too well lying
there, dead drunk. Lincoln stopped, and the rest, knowing the tenderness
of his heart, exclaimed:

"Aw, let him alone, Abe. 'Twon't do him no good. He's made his bed, let
him lay in it!"

The rest laughed--for the "bed" was freezing mud. But Abe could see no
humor in the situation. The man might be run over, or freeze to death.
To abandon any human being in such a plight seemed too monstrous to him.
The other young men hurried on in the cold, shrugging their shoulders
and shaking their heads--"Poor Abe!--he's a hopeless case," and left
Lincoln to do the work of a Good Samaritan alone. He had no beast on
which to carry the dead weight of the drunken man, whom he vainly tried,
again and again, to arouse to a sense of the predicament he was in. At
last the young man took up the apparently lifeless body of the
mud-covered man in his strong arms