But his mother was dead! Still this mother had left her impress,
and she had become in that boy's heart "an angel of a mother." She made
him what he afterwards proved himself to be. Follow Abraham Lincoln
where we will,--from the cradle to the grave,--and we shall find honesty
and kindness ever distinguishing him. In his boyhood, among boys, he was
always fighting the battle of the offended and the weak; in manhood, he
was always protecting the fugitive from an angry mob; as a lawyer,
saving the widow's son from the gallows, and declining the rich fee of
an unrighteous cause; as a public debater, the fairest ever met in the
political arena; and as president of the republic, honest in his
convictions and kind to his bitterest enemies.
Let us not forget the difficulties which it was his lot and his good
fortune to surmount. He never was six months at school in his life; and
yet, by the use of a single book and the occasional aid of a village
schoolmaster, he became an expert surveyor in six weeks! At the age of
twenty-one he accompanied his family to Illinois. One morning, when
seated at the breakfast-table of his employer, Lincoln was told that a
man living six miles away had a copy of an English grammar. He left the
table at once, and went and borrowed the book. During the long winter
evenings that followed, in the light of the village cooper's shop, he
pored over the pages of that book,--studying the science of language,
the theory of human speech, and qualifying himself to become the author
of one of the three great State papers of modern times, by the light of
burning shavings!
But we leave that early life of his, which, in rude simplicity, repeats
"the short and simple annals of the poor.
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