THE AWAKENING OF AMBITION

Learning life's lessons and building character amid poverty, toil, and sorrow. Abraham starting to school at ten. Walking nine miles a day to and fro. Eager to study.-Ciphering on a wooden shovel and making notes on the logs of his cabin. — His passion for books-borrowing and reading all the volumes within a fifty-mile circle. - Working three days to pay for a damaged book. Only a few months' schooling in all.

"It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up. There were some schools, so called, but 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. There was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education.' - ABRAHAM LINCOLN, in his own life sketch. Nevertheless it was in those backwoods of Indiana that the ambition of Lincoln was awakened. There, out of poverty and toil and sorrow, the sturdy nature of the child was woven, and there the man was born, sprung from the very earth. The wild forest was his university, and it taught him more than

many boys learn in academic groves, for it taught him to use his hand as well as his head, and to think and act for himself. His mental growth was slow and did not cease while he lived; but morally, his character seemed to come almost to its full stature in mere boyhood.

His noble stepmother insisted that all her children should be sent to school, though the fee for the teacher must have been a heavy burden for the Lincolns. The father knew nothing of school, and cared no more. To him it was a sheer waste of time, and he needed what the labor of the boys could earn.

There were no schoolhouses in southern Indiana. A roving teacher could hold sessions only in some tumble-down cabin. Mean as the opportunity was to gain an education in such a hovel, the boy Lincoln seized it eagerly. At one time he had to walk nine miles a day in going to and from school.

The road he traveled probably was no more than a mere deer path through the lonely woods, but he loved the solitude. The noon lunch, which he carried in his pocket, was only a corn-dodger, a cake made from coarse meal. He would study all day Sunday, for there was no church to attend, and every minute he could steal as he went about his Saturday chores he gave to his lessons. The

poor father hated the sight of a thing so useless to himself as a book, and the stepmother had to beg him to let Abraham read at home.

To practise his lessons in arithmetic he used a wooden shovel, for he had no slate, paper was scarce, and there was not a lead pencil in the house. When he had covered the shovel with his sums done in charcoal, he would scrape off the figures and thus be ready for a fresh start. He scrawled his notes from his books all over the logs of his cabin and on any piece of board he could pick up. This spirit naturally sent him to the head of his class with a bound. He gained such readiness in spelling that he soon "spelled down" the entire school, and at last was barred from spelling matches, so it is said.

Writing was another of his favorite studies, and he acquired a good, clear hand. This assured him the proud position of the letter-writer for the family and their illiterate neighbors. One of the earliest Lincoln manuscripts in existence was written by him as a form for a friend :—

"Good boys, who to their books apply,

Will all be great men by and by."

He no sooner could read than he took fire with a passion for books. He had none at home, and there was no public library. Wherever he heard of

a book, near or far, he went afoot to see the owner, and borrowed it and kept it until he had devoured all there was between its covers. In this way he found and read "Esop's Fables," Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," "Robinson Crusoe," and a history of the United States.

To retain for reference the things he liked best, he bought a note-book, into which he copied his favorite selections. His pen was made from the quill of a turkey buzzard and his ink from the juice of a brier root.

A dictionary coming to his hand, he read it, page by page, day after day, until the last ray of light had faded. In later years he said that if any one used a word or phrase in his hearing which he could not understand, it always had made him angry. He remembered as a boy climbing to his loft in a rage more than once on this account, and walking the floor far into the night, while trying to work out the meaning of something he had heard. He could not sleep until he had solved the puzzle and found a way to state the same idea in the plainest words.

Even a copy of the statutes of Indiana fell a prey to the timber boy's wild hunger for knowledge. He read it through as eagerly as if it had been a detective story. Nor was he poorly rewarded,