CHAPTER VI.

BORROWED TREASURES.

The Art of Story-Telling-The Wonders in Books-The Uses of Written Words.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN was just the kind of boy to speedily make the acquaintance of every new family as soon as he heard of its arrival.

It was not only that he was of an eminently sociable disposition. His few weeks of training under Hazel Dorsey had once more brought to his mind a great and mysterious fact of human life, and its meaning was taking feverish possession of him. There were books!

He had seen a very few, and knew but little about the manner of their making; and even less definite were his ideas of what might be in them. There was something weird and wonderful in their very existence, and there was no telling what wonder of a book a new family might own and bring with them. He already knew of men who had brought whole libraries; two, three, four, perhaps half a dozen books gathered under one roof. It was worth while to walk a few miles, and then to talk around and bear a helping hand at chopping or something, to make acquaintance with human beings from whom such a treasure as a bound volume might perhaps be afterwards borrowed.

The unprinted learning of the backwoods, fact and fiction, history and humor, travels from memory to memory by word of mouth. Abe already knew and could tell more stories of all sorts than any other scholar of Hazel Dorsey; but he came home one day from a borrowing expedition with a book that could beat him completely. He had found a copy of Æsops'

Fables, and he was to learn from it how to put sharp points to his stories, at need, and make invaluable weapons of them. Before he had read that book through more than a score of times, he could make over into an arrowy "fable," with a moral of some kind or a sting at the end of it, almost any anecdote or incident with which his memory was stored, and Æsop had been his schoolmaster in the subtle art of doing it well.

A good story-teller was an important public acquisition, and Abe's popularity was assured in all the wide and growing circle of his acquaintances.

The Fables were a borrowed book, and had to be returned in time; but before long their place was filled by a story-teller of a very different kind, sure to leave behind him an equally indelible mark on the mind of his young reader.

Abe's new prize came near getting him into disgrace for neglecting his share of the growing corn. How could a boy do justice to a corn-field with such a treat awaiting him in his mother's cupboard at the house?

An English tinker had written it: a low fellow who spent many years of his life in jail for using his tongue too freely. His name was John Bunyan, and he could hardly have been poorer if he had settled in Indiana before it became a State. Still, he had written the "Pilgrim's Progress," and Abe Lincoln had now borrowed a stray copy of it. Before that book went home, Abe knew it almost by heart. It was impossible to do that without learning a great deal, even if a dull and unimpressible boy had been the learner; and the lessons taught by Bunyan through that marvelous pilgrimage were the very lessons Abe Lincoln's education thus far had left him in need of. All the life around him, from his cradle, had been and still was coarse, rude, earthy, sensuous, to the last degree sordid and unspiritual.

Other books turned up here and there, and the family Bible at home was an unfailing resource to Abe for everything but theology.

The summer and fall went by and winter came, but no school came with it. For some reason Hazel Dorsey failed to gather again his scattered pupils, and it was a full year more before the little log seminary could renew its usefulness. Then came a new teacher with many new ways. Mr. Andrew Crawford saw at once that the young people who came trooping around him were in need of other things as well as reading and writing, or even arithmetic. His own scholarship was equal to reasonable demands, and he could carry them as far as the "rule of three," but he could appease no hunger for any higher mathematics. Such merely ornamental branches as grammar and geography were not insisted on by the parents who employed him, but he was willing to add, of his own free gift, other and valuable instruction. From the outset he began to teach them "manners," and no such thing had been heard of before in all that settlement. Every pupil was taught and drilled in the proper method of getting into a room and getting out of it, with all the kindred niceties of making introductions and acquaintanceships. There was abundant fun in it for the boys and girls; and the next best thing to that was Mr. Crawford's great attention to the correctness of their spelling.

It was not long before Abe's book-training began to show its fruits. He was acknowledged to be the leader of the school in the matter of putting together the right letters to make up a word. He became, in fact, a sort of good-natured walking dictionary for the rest, and it was at times needful to turn so willing a prompter out of doors during contested matches or perplexing recitations.

One day the spelling-class embraced nearly the entire school, and Abe had been duly turned out, after a terrific threat from Mr. Crawford that he would keep his victims there all night if they failed to give the correct spelling of the hard word "defied." There was indeed work before a mob of young people every soul of whom was possessed with a conviction that the verbal

stumbling-block had a "y" in it. All around the class it went, and half-way around again but just as it reached a favorite of his named Polly Roby, there was Abe's head at the open window behind the master, with a finger in one eye and a suggestive wink in the other.

Polly's quick wits caught the hint; the awful word was conquered in a second, and Andrew Crawford was sure there had been no unfair assistance given by Abraham Lincoln.

There was one other department of that primitive schooling in which Abe stood all alone. He was the only scholar who insisted on turning his writing-lessons into any kind of "compositions." It was altogether out of Andrew Crawford's line and beyond him. He would not have done any such thing himself, and he would not encourage in wild literary extravagance a lot of children whose life-business was to be the raising of corn and the making of pork. Perhaps even Abe might not have undertaken it so very early if he had not found a work of common humanity calling for the use of his pen.

There was not an animal in the woods for which he had not a kindly feeling. Even the woodchucks he dug out of their holes were in a manner his neighbors, and the land-turtles got out of his way, so far as any danger to them was concerned, mainly because he might carelessly step on them with his immense feet. The other boys were not by any means so tenderhearted, and a terrapin marching away from some of them with a live coal on his back offered a fine subject to Abe for an essay upon "Cruelty to Animals."

It was first given orally to the young savages who were maltreating the helpless terrapin. Then it came out in slowly written sentences in Abe's copy-book. Then it grew and widened into a full-sized "composition," and Abe's career as a writer had fairly begun. He had learned to spell words, and now he had discovered for himself the great art of making them stand in effective order upon paper. Still, paper was scarce, and it was necessary to be exceedingly economical in

the use of it. No word could go down upon such precious material until the writer felt very sure it was the best one he could use in that place, and no more could be employed than were needed to do the work in hand and express the exact meaning intended. The scarcity of paper, therefore, was itself an excellent teacher, continually forcing the young essayist to avoid the most common fault of all writers, trained and untrained.

There were ways to be invented, however, of overcoming the paper difficulty, in part, and of still obtaining an idea of how any given sentence would look in written characters. There was the great wooden shovel in the chimney-corner every night. The surface of it could be shaved clean with his father's "drawing-knife," and then, by the light of the fire, aided by that of a small torch of hickory or birch bark, the whole face of the shovel could be covered with figures and letters. By day and out of doors a basswood shingle would answer the same purpose, with a piece of charcoal for a crayon. A matter could be written and rewritten, and anything pronounced worthy of preservation could be carefully transferred with pen and ink to the pages of an old blank-book which was one of Abe's choicest treasures. Not all the contents of that miscellaneous collection were original, for it contained also copious quotations from every volume its owner managed to borrow.

More of these were now coming within reach, from time to time. Some of the books themselves were a kind of human being. No other settler came into that neighborhood in all those days who was more a real man, come to a real new country, than was Robinson Crusoe, and Abe learned most thoroughly all the ingenious methods of that wonderful castaway in dealing with dangers and difficulties.

Blackhawk and his warriors were only a few days' march northwestward, and, although there was no "man Friday" to be obtained among them, the print of a moccasined foot in the