only the words he spelled. His first two years in Indiana seem
to have passed without schooling of any sort, and the school he attended
shortly after coming under the care of his stepmother was of the
simplest kind, for the Pigeon Creek settlement numbered only eight or
ten poor families, and they lived deep in the forest, where, even if
they had had the money for such luxuries, it would have been impossible
to buy books, slates, pens, ink, or paper. It is worthy of note,
however, that in our western country, even under such difficulties, a
school-house was one of the first buildings to rise in every frontier
settlement. Abraham's second school in Indiana was held when he was
fourteen years old, and the third in his seventeenth year. By that time
he had more books and better teachers, but he had to walk four or five
miles to reach them. We know that he learned to write, and was
provided with pen, ink, and a copy-book, and a very small supply of
writing-paper, for copies have been printed of several scraps on which
he carefully wrote down tables of long measure, land measure, and dry
measure, as well as examples in multiplication and compound division,
from his arithmetic. He was never able to go to school again after this
time, and though the instruction he received from his five teachers--two
in Kentucky and three in Indiana--extended over a period of nine years,
it must be remembered that it made up in all less than one twelve-month;
"that the aggregate of all his schooling did not amount to one year."
The fact that he received this instruction, as he himself said, "by
littles," was doubtless an advantage. A lazy or indifferent boy would
of course have forgotten what was taught him at one time before he had
opportunity at another; but Abraham was neither indifferent nor lazy,
and these widely separated fragments of instruction were precious steps
to self-help. He pursued his studies with very unusual purpose and
determination not only to understand them at the moment, but to fix
them firmly in his mind. His early companions all agree that he employed
every spare moment in keeping on with some one of his studies. His
stepmother tells us that "When he came across a passage that struck him,
he would write it down on boards if he had no paper, and keep it there
until he did get paper. Then he would rewrite it, look at it, repeat
it. He had a copy-book, a kind of scrap-book, in which he put down all
things, and thus preserve