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out in wonder and lofty eminence, one of the colossal figures of modern history. It was these earlier years of his life that had their lasting effect on the mind and temperament of this great mirthful but melancholy man.

The date of the removal from Kentucky to Indiana is readily fixed by the statement of Mr. Lincoln in the sketch of his life which he wrote and delivered to his friend Jesse W. Fell, of Bloomington, Illinois, in 1859. "We reached our new home," he relates, "about the time the State came into the Union" - which would indicate the years 1816 to 1817. After describing the country as a "wild region with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods," he turns to the educational facilities of the period, observing that "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. Of course when I came of age I did not know much. Still, somehow, I could read, write and cipher to the Rule of Three; but that was all. I have not been to school since. The little advance I now have upon this store of education I have picked up from time to time under the pressure of necessity."

The years of his residence in Indiana Lincoln never failed to recall save with the deepest satisfaction. They were indeed the formative period of his life and therefore constitute an important epoch in his development. There was a fascination in the rude companionship and boisterous horse-play of southern Indiana at that time which left

a deep impression on the tall, coarse-haired youth who grew to manhood in the hills and forests of this frontier region. When he neared the fame of later years he invariably located his best stories in the Hoosier State, and whenever he was heard to say, "That reminds me of an incident which happened when I lived in Indiana," his listeners would move their chairs closer together anxiously awaiting an interesting recital, bristling with wit and the expected "nib," or moral, which was so poignant it pierced the skin, or otherwise so effective it stung like the cracker of a whiplash.

Though brief, Lincoln's school training really began in Indiana. True he was among the pupils at the schools in Kentucky taught by Zachariah Riney and Caleb Hazel, but his attendance was so short and irregular he hardly progressed beyond the alphabet-in fact, it may be truthfully said that he went largely as the companion of his only sister Sarah, who was two years his senior. The array of textbooks at his command was necessarily limited. We know he studied Webster's and, a part of the time, Dillworth's Speller, Pike's Arithmetic, and Murray's English Reader. Of the last-named book he was especially fond. Herndon told me that Lincoln once declared to him that "Murray's English Reader was the greatest and most useful book that could be put in the hands of a child at school."

He had neither grammar nor geography. The arithmetic he did not own, but he borrowed the book of a neighbor and laboriously copied a large part of it on sheets of paper about nine by twelve inches in size which he fastened together with twine sewed through the edge. His step

PAGE FROM LINCOLN'S HAND-MADE ARITHMETIC, USED BY HIM WHILE A SCHOOLBOY IN GENTRYVILLE, INDIANA, SHOWING DOGGEREL IN CORNER

SCHOOLING IN INDIANA

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mother who, in 1865, was living at Charleston, Illinois, still had a portion of this hand-made book which she gave to Herndon. The latter turned several pages over to me, one of which contains the table of Long Measure with its quaint and primitive divisions of measurement:

"Three barley-corns make one inch,

Four inches one hand," etc.

It was in one of the lower corners of this sheet that young Abe had scrawled the four memorable lines of schoolboy doggerel:

"Abraham Lincoln,

His hand and pen,
He will be good,

But God knows when."

In some unaccountable way the young student secured a copy of Barclay's Dictionary which he doubtless frequently consulted, for when Herndon visited the stepmother the latter still had the volume with young Abe's name, in his own hand, written on the fly-leaf. At two places in the neighborhood where he lived in Indiana, the stepmother told Herndon, the boy was given access to books of a more literary character and he was occasionally permitted to take a volume home with him to read. This was at Josiah Crawford's and David Turnham's. From the first he obtained "The Kentucky Preceptor," out of which he learned the various poems and declamations he memorized and occasionally recited at school. At Turnham's there were two books to which he was especially attached and he read and re-read them. They were "Sinbad the Sailor" and "Scott's Lessons." These and the Revised Statutes of Indiana, which Turnham used in connection with the office of township constable, and which volume