HOUSE NEAR BEECHLAND, KENTUCKY, WHERE THOMAS LINCOLN AND NANCY HANKS WERE MARRIED.

From a photograph in the collection of O. H. Oldroyd, preserved in the house in which Lincoln died, Washington, D. C

father's carpenter shop, hunted coons and ran the woods with him, and once even saved his life.

"Yes," Mr. Gollaher was accustomed to say, the story that I once saved Abraham Lincoln's life is true. He and I had been going to school together for a year or more, and had become greatly attached to each other. Then school disbanded on account of there being so few scholars, and we did not see each other much for a long while. One Sunday my mother visited the Lincolns, and I was taken along. Abe and I played around all day. Finally, we concluded to cross the creek to hunt for some partridges young Lincoln had seen the day before. The creek was swollen by a recent rain, and, in crossing on the narrow footlog, Abe fell in. Neither of us could swim. I got a long pole and held it out to Abe, who grabbed it. Then I pulled him ashore. He was almost dead, and I was badly scared. I rolled and pounded him in good earnest. Then I got him by the arms and shook him, the water meanwhile pouring out of his mouth. means I succeeded in bringing him to, and he was soon all right.

By this

"Then a new difficulty confronted us. If our mothers discovered our wet clothes they would whip us. This we dreaded from experience, and determined to avoid. It was June, the sun was very warm, and we soon dried our clothing by spreading it on the rocks about us. We promised never to tell the story, and I never did until after Lincoln's tragic end."

At

When the little boy was about four years old the first real excitement of his life occurred. His father moved from the farm on Nolin creek to another some fifteen miles northeast on Knob creek, and here the child began to go to school. that day the schools in the west were usually accidental, depending upon the coming of some poor and ambitious young man who was willing to teach a few terms while he looked for an opening to something better. The terms were irregular, their length being decided by the time the settlers

felt able to board the master and pay his small salary. The chief qualifications for a school-master seem to have been enough strength to keep the "big boys" in order, though one high authority affirms that pluck went " for a heap sight more'n sinnoo with boys."

Many of the itinerant masters were Catholics, strolling Irishmen from the colony in Tennessee, or French priests from Kaskaskia. Lincoln's first teacher, Zachariah Riney, was a Catholic. Of his second teacher, Caleb Hazel, we know even less than of Riney. Mr. Gollaher says that Abraham Lincoln, in those days when he was his schoolmate, was "an unusually bright boy at school, and made splendid progress in his studies. Indeed, he learned faster than any of his schoolmates. Though so young, he studied very hard. He would get spicewood bushes, hack them up on a log, and burn them two or three together, for the purpose of giving light by which he might pursue his studies."

Probably the boy's mother had something to do with the spice-wood illuminations. Tradition has it that Mrs. Lincoln took great pains to teach her children what she knew, and that at her knee they heard all the Bible lore, fairy tales, and country legends that she had been able to gather in her poor life.

Besides the "A B C schools," as Lincoln called them, the only other medium of education in the country districts of Kentucky in those days was "preaching." Itinerants like the school-masters, the preachers, of whatever denomination, were generally uncouth and illiterate; the code of morals they taught was mainly a healthy one, and they, no doubt, did much to keep the consciences of the pioneers awake. It is difficult to believe that they ever did much for the moral training of young Lincoln, though he certainly got his first notion of public speaking from them; and for years in his boyhood one of his chief delights was to gather his playmates about him,

VIEW OF ROCK SPRING FARM, WHERE PRESIDENT LINCOLN WAS BORN. From a photograph taken in September, 1895, for this biography. The house in which Lincoln was born is seen to the right, in the background.

See page 14.