EARLY EDUCATION.-BOOKS ABRAHAM READ. THE JONES GROCERY STORE.-LIFE ON THE RIVER.

ITH all his hard living and hard work, Lincoln was getting, in this period, a desultory kind of education. Not that he received much schooling. He went to school" by littles," he says; "in all it did not amount to more than a year." And, if we accept his own description of the teachers, it was, perhaps, just as well that it was only "by littles." "No qualification was ever required of a teacher beyond 'readin', writin', and cipherin' to the rule of three.' If a straggler supposed to understand Latin happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizard." But more or less of the schoolroom is a matter of small importance if a boy has learned to read, and to think of what he reads. And that, this boy had learned. His stock of books was small, but he knew them thoroughly, and they were good books to know: the Bible, "Esop's Fables," "Robinson

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Crusoe," Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress,' a History of the United States," Weems's "Life of Washington," and the "Statutes of Indiana." These are the chief ones we know about. He did not own them all, but sometimes had to borrow them from the neighbors: a practice which resulted in at least one casualty, for Weems's "Life of Washington" he allowed to get wet, and to make good the loss he had to pull fodder three days. No matter. The book became his then, and he I could read it as he would. Fortunately he took this curious work in profound seriousness, which a wide-awake boy would hardly be expected to do to-day. Washington became an exalted figure in his imagination; and he always contended later, when the question of the real character of the first President was brought up, that it was wiser to regard him as a godlike being, heroic in nature and deeds, as Weems did, than to contend that he was only a man who, if wise and good, still made mistakes and indulged in follies, like other men.

In 1861, addressing the Senate of the State of New Jersey, he said:

"May I be pardoned if, upon this occasion, I mention that away back in my childhood, the earliest days of my being able to read, I got hold of a small book, such a one as few of the younger members have ever seen- -Weems's 'Life of Washington.' I remember all the accounts there given of the battlefields and struggles for the liberties of the country, and none fixed themselves upon my imagination so deeply as the struggle here at Trenton, New Jersey. The crossing of the river, the contest with the Hessians, the great hardships endured at that time, all fixed themselves on my memory more than any single Revolutionary event; and you all know, for you have all been boys, how these early impressions last longer than any others. I recollect thinking then, boy even though I was, that there must have been something more than common that these men struggled for."

Besides these books he borrowed many. He once told a friend that he "read through every book he had ever heard of in that country, for a circuit of fifty miles." From everything he read he made long extracts, using a turkey-buzzard pen and brier-root ink. When he had no paper he would write on a board, and thus preserve his selections until he secured a copybook. The wooden fire-shovel was his usual slate, and on its back he ciphered with a charred stick, shaving it off when covered. The logs and boards in his vicinity he filled with his figures and quotations. By night he read and worked as

long as there was light, and he kept a book in the crack of the logs in his loft, to have it at hand at peep of day. When acting as ferryman, in his nineteenth year, anxious, no doubt, to get through the books of the house where he boarded, before he left the place, he read every night "till midnight." *

Every lull in his daily labor he used for reading, rarely going to his work without a book. When ploughing or cultivating the rough fields of Spencer County, he found frequently a half hour for reading. At the end of every long row the horse was allowed to rest, and Lincoln had his book out, and was perched on stump or fence, almost as soon as the plough had come to a standstill. One of the few people still left in Gentryville who remembers Lincoln, Captain John Lamar, tells

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Copyright, 1894 by D. Appleton & Co., publishers of Herndon's "Life of Lincoln," and reproduced by special permission.

JOHN HANKS.

The son of Joseph Hanks, with whom Thomas Lincoln learned the carpenter's trade, and a cousin of Nancy Hanks Lincoln. John Hanks lived with Thomas Lincoln in Indiana, from about 1823 to 1827, then returned to Kentucky, and from there emigrated to Illinois. It was largely through his influence that Thomas Lincoln and Dennis Hanks went to the Sangamon country in 1830. When Mr. Lincoln first left home he and John Hanks worked together. In 1831 they made a trip to New Orleans on a flatboat. It was John Hanks who, in 1860, accompanied Governor Oglesby to the old Lincoln farm in Macon County, to select the rails Lincoln had split, and it was he who carried them into the convention of the Republican party of Illinois, which nominated Lincoln as its candidate. John Hanks was an illiterate man, being able neither to read nor write; but he was honest and kindly, and his reminiscences of Mr. Lincoln's early life, gathered by Mr. Herndon and others, are regarded by all who knew him as trustworthy. After Mr. Lincoln's election to the Presidency, he desired an Indian agency; but his lack of even a rudimentary education made it impossible to give it to him.

The first authorized sketch of Lincoln's life was written by the late John L. Scripps of the Chicago Tribune," who went to Springfield at Mr. Lincoln's request, and by him was furnished the data for a campaign biography. In a letter written to Mr. Herndon after the death of Lincoln, which Herndon turned over to me, Scripps relates that in writing his book he stated that Lincoln as a youth read Plutarch's "Lives." This he did simply because, as a rule, almost every boy in the West in the early days did read Plutarch. When the advance sheets of the book reached Mr. Lincoln, he sent for the author and said, gravely: "That paragraph wherein you state that I read Plutarch's 'Lives' was not true when you wrote it, for up to that moment in my life I had never seen that early contribution to human history; but I want your book, even if it is nothing more than a campaign sketch, to be faithful to the facts; and in order that that statement might be literally true, I secured the book a few days ago, and have sent for you to tell you I have just read it through."-JESSE W. WEIK.

JUDGE JOHN PITCHER.

A lawyer of Rockport, Indiana, at the time the Lincolns lived near Gentryville. An essay of Mr. Lincoln's, composed when he was about nineteen, was submitted to Mr. Pitcher, who declared the "world couldn't beat it ;" and he seems to have taken a kindly interest in the author from that time forward, lending him books freely from his law office. Mr. Pitcher was still living in 1889, in Mt. Vernon, Indiana, having reached the age of ninety-three years. His reminiscences of the boyhood of Lincoln are embodied in Herndon's "Life."

to this day of riding to mill with his father, and seeing, as they drove along, a boy sitting on the top rail of an old-fashioned stakeand-rider worm fence, reading so intently that he did not notice their approach. His father, turning to him, said: "John, look at that boy yonder, and mark my words, he will make a smart man out of himself. I may not see it, but you'll see if my words don't come true.' "That boy was Abraham Lincoln," adds Mr. Lamar, impressively.

In his habits of reading and study the boy had little encouragement from his father, but his step-mother did all she could for him. Indeed, between the two there soon grew up a relation of touching gentleness and confidence. In one of the interviews a biographer of Mr. Lincoln sought with her before her death, Mrs. Lincoln said:

"I induced my husband to permit Abe to read and study at home, as well as at school. At first he was not easily reconciled to it, but finally he too seemed willing to encourage him to a certain extent. Abe was a dutiful son to me always, and we took particular care when he was reading not to disturb him-would let him read on and on till he quit of his own accord."

This consideration of his step-mother won the boy's confidence, and he rarely copied anything that he did not take it to her to read, asking her opinion of it; and often, when she did not understand it, explaining the meaning in his plain and simple language.

No newspaper ever escaped him. One man in Gentryville, Mr. Jones, the storekeeper, took a Louisville paper, and here Lincoln went regularly to read and discuss its contents. All the men and boys of the neighborhood gathered there, and every