The Birmingham age-herald., 1905-11-12
PRESIDENTS BOYHOOD.
Young Lincoln Made the Best of
 Scanty Schooling.
Helen Nicolay in St. Nicholas.

Helen Nicolay in St. Nicholas.
 As Abraham had been only seven years old when he left Kentucky, the little be- ginnings he learned in the schools kept by Rney and Hazel in that state must have been very slight, probably only his alpha bet, or at most only three or four pages of Webster's Elementary Spelling Book" The multiplication table was still a mys- tery to him, and he could read or write 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 case 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. Abra ham's second school in Indiana was held when he was IA 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 copybook-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 and dry measure, as well as examples in multiplication and com pound division. from his arithmetic. He i was never able to go to school again after this time, and though the instruc- tion he received from his five teachers two in Kentucky and three in Indiana-ex- tended 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 ad- vantage. A lazy indifferent boy would. of course, have forgotten what was taught him at one time before he had op- portunity at another; but Abraham was neither indifferent nor lazy, and these widely separated fragments of instruction | were precious steps to self-help. He pur- sued his studies with very unusual pur- i pose and determination, not only to un- derstand them at the moment, but to fix them firmly in his mind. His early com panions 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 1 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 copybook, a kind of scrapbook, in which he put down all things and thus preserved them.
 He spent long evenings doing sums on the fire shovel Iron fire shovels were a rarity among pioneers Instead they used a broad, thin clapboard with one end mar l rowed to a handle, arranging with this i, the piles of coals upon the hearth, over which they set their skillet and "oven' to do their cooking. It was on such a wooden shovel that Abraham worked his sums by the fickering freight, making his figures with piece of charcoal, and when the shovel was all covered taking a drawing knife and shaving it off clean | again.
 The hours that he was able to devote to his penmanship, his reading and his arith- metic were by no means many; for, save | for the short time that he was actually in school, he was during all these years, laboring hard on his fathers farm or hir- ing his youthful strength to neighbors who had need of help in the work of field or forest In pursuit of his knowledge he was on an uphill path: yet in spite of all obstacles he worked his way to so much of an education as placed him far ahead of his schoolmates and quickly abreast of his various teachers. He bor- rowed every book in the neighborhood. The list is short one: Robinson Cru soe," "Aesops Fables" Bunyans "Pil- srim's Progress" Weems' Life of Wash ington' and a History of the United States" When everything else had been read he resolutely began on the Revised Statutes of Indiana" which Dave Turn ham, the constable, had in daily use but permitted him to come to his house and read.