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was no hand to pitch into work like killing snakes." At the same time Mr. Crawford could find no man to suit him as well as Abraham, when the latter was but fifteen years of age.

We protest, here and now, against this charge of laziness which some biographers have made so prominent. Nothing was ever more common than to charge studious boys and girls with laziness. A great many men and women, who know no better, bring the same charge against professional gentlemen. Any person who is not obliged to work on the farm, or at the forge, or engaged in some other manual labour, for a livelihood, they pronounce lazy and aristocratic. Through sheer ignorance, studying and literary aspirations are regarded as proof of laziness. It was so in Abraham's time. Because he possessed talents that craved knowledge as the appetite craves food, leading him to snatch fragments of time for reading, and perhaps to devote hours to the bewitching pastime that ought to have been given to hard work, careless, ignorant observers called him "lazy." It is a base slander. There was not a lazy bone in him. The boy who will improve such bits of time as he can save from his daily toil for study, and sit up nights to read the Life of Washington, or master a problem of mathematics, is not lazy. He may love a book more than he loves chopping or threshing, just as another may love the latter more than he does the former; but he is not lazy. Laziness wastes the spare hours of the day in bringing nothing to pass, and gives the night to sleep instead of mental improvement. As many of the busiest and most cheerful workers in our country are its scholars, without a particle of the element of laziness in their composition, so many of the most industrious and noble boys are those who prefer a book to the plough, and would rather go to

school than to harvesting. That was true of Abraham Lincoln. His heart was set on books; but his hands were so ready for hard work that any farmer was glad to hire him at the age of fourteen or fifteen, because he would do more work than any youth of his age. He would chop more wood in a day, lift larger logs, and "pull more fodder," boy as he was, than half the men who hired him.

True, from the time that John Baldwin, the blacksmith, came into the neighbourhood, when Abraham was about ten years old, he would steal away to the smithy's shop to listen to his stories. John was a great story-teller, and he was fond of children also, and these were attractions enough for such a precocious boy. His mind yearned for thoughts; it was desperate for entertainment; and the blacksmith's stories, and incidents of his life, supplied both thoughts and entertainment. He spent much time with this jolly son of Vulcan before he began to tell stories himself, and, after that he exchanged them with the smutty toiler at the forge. But there was no evidence of laziness in those visits to the blacksmith's shop. And when we place this freak of a singularly bright boy, together with all his other acts that denoted laziness to the ignorant pioneers, beside the fact that in manhood, to the day of his death, Abraham Lincoln was one of the hardest workers who ever lived, both at manual and intellectual labour, ignoring all ten hour systems, and toiling fifteen, sixteen, and even eighteen hours a day, to satisfy his honourable ambition, the charge of laziness is branded as slander on the part of those who make it. "The boy

is father to the man," the lazy boy makes the lazy man, and vice versa. If Abraham was a lazy boy, his manhood completely belied his youth, and the old maxim is exploded.

We have seen that they who called him lazy coupled the charge with the statement that he was always "reading and thinking," evidently considering that his love of books was proof of a disposition to shirk labour. Their ignorance is the explanation of, and excuse for, their charge.

We have made this digression, at this point, in order to direct the attention of the reader to an important element of Lincoln's character, that will find ample support in the sequel.

Now that we are speaking of Abraham's books, we may record the facts about two other volumes, that came into his hands within two years after Æsop's Fables. They were Ramsay's Life of Washington, and Robinson Crusoe.

Dennis Hanks came home one day and said to Abraham,

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"Don't you want to read the life of Washington?" Of course I do," was his reply. "What do you ask me that for?"

"Because I've seen one."

"Where?"

"Down at Anderson's Creek."

"Who did it belong to?"

Dennis told him, adding, "He offered to lend it to me."

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Any time you are there; there's no doubt of it." Without recording the details of this affair, it will answer our purpose to say that Abraham embraced the first opportunity to secure the loan of that valuable biography. He knew that Washington was called the "father of his country"-that he was Commander-in-chief of the army in the American Revolution. He had been told, also, of the part his

grandfather took in the "war of independence." This was all he knew of the illustrious statesman whose life he purposed to read; but this was quite enough to awaken his enthusiasm over the volume. It was read and re-read with the deepest interest, and its contents discussed with his father and Dennis, both of whom learned more about Washington and his times from Abraham than they ever knew before.

It is not known how he came into possession of Robinson Crusoe. Doubtless the book was borrowed; and it proved a source of genuine satisfaction to him. Once reading it only created the desire to read it a second time, and even a third time. There was a kind of witchery about the book to his active mind, different from that exerted over him even by The Pilgrim's Progress. He could scarcely command language to express his admiration of the volume.

M

VIII.

A NEW MOTHER AND SCHOOLS.

R. LINCOLN remained a widower until Decem

ber 1819. During this time his only housekeeper was his daughter Sarah. Abraham was a “handy boy" about the cabin, and often rendered timely aid to his sister in her daily work. He became so expert in household matters that, a few years later, when he "worked out" among the farmers, their wives pronounced him the "best hand," because he was so "handy," and was willing to make fires, bring wood and water, or tend the baby. It was evidently a good school for him, since his manhood was characterized by being "handy about the house." A dweller in Springfield, Illinois, where Abraham commenced his public life, a citizen, remembers how he "used to draw the baby back and forth in front of his house, early in the summer morning, while his wife was getting breakfast, at the same time reading a book that he held in one hand."

But Thomas Lincoln needed a wife, and his son needed a mother. Household affairs had been left "at loose ends," as they are likely to be where there is no mother to superintend. There was not that neatness and order necessary to make even a cabin home attractive; and what clothes the children had were in a very dilapidated condition. It was both wise and necessary for Lincoln to go in search of a wife.

He remembered Sally Bush, of Elizabethtown, Ken

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