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picked berries, nuts, and wild fruits for the family and trudged a mile to a spring for water. All around them was the unbroken wilderness. Abraham’s Fine Stepmother–SarahIn the autumn of 1818 Nancy Hanks Lincoln died of the dread frontier disease called “milk sickness.” Sarah, only 11 years old, took over the cooking and cabin chores while Thomas and young Abe cut timber to clear farm land. After a year the little family was in sorry shape. They needed a woman’s help. Thomas rode back to Elizabethtown, Ky., and married a widow, Sarah Bush Johnston, whom he had known since boyhood. He brought her and her three children to the shabby little log cabin in Indiana. Abe and his sister Sarah quickly learned to love their second mother. She was a big-boned woman, with clear skin, friendly eyes, and a quiet way of getting things done. She cleaned up the untidy cabin. She had Thomas make a wood floor and chairs and build a bed for the feather mattress she had brought from Kentucky. Young Abe and Sarah had never lived in a cabin so homelike. Thomas did better on the farm, too, and the children began to eat and dress better. Sarah Lincoln did all this without any criticism or impatient words. She knew well that the family needed her. Best of all, she encouraged Abe to study. She was not educated, but she saw how eager he was to learn. In later years he said of her: “She was the best friend I ever had. . . . All that I am, I owe to my angel mother.” Sarah Lincoln told people: “He was the best boy I ever saw. I never gave him a cross word in my life. His mind and mine, what little I had, seemed to run together.”Abe Grows Up with BooksSarah made Thomas send the gangling 11-year-old to school. There was no regular teacher. When some man came along who knew a little about the three R’s, he might teach the boys and girls for a few weeks–usually in the winter when farm work was slack. Whenever “school kept” at Pigeon Creek, Abe hiked four miles each way, his cowhide boots sloshing in the snow. He did not mind this long, uncomfortable hike to and from school because he was glad to be learning. All subjects fascinated him. In all his life his schooling did not add up to a year, but he made up for it by reading. A cousin, Dennis Hanks, who came to live with the Lincolns, said: “I never seen Abe after he was 12 that he didn’t have a book somewheres around.” By the time Abe was 14 he would often read at night by the light of the log fire. His first books were the Bible, ‘Aesop’s Fables’, and ‘Robinson Crusoe’. When he was 15 years old he was so tall and strong that he often worked as a hired hand on other farms. Usually, while he plowed or split fence rails, he kept a borrowed book tucked in his shirt to read while he lunched or rested. He could turn in a good day’s work when he had to. Many neighbors, however, called him lazy, saying he was “always readin’ and thinkin’.” Once Abe grinned and told his farm boss, “My father taught me to work, but he never taught me to love it.”A farmer loaned him ‘The Life of George Washington’, by Parson Weems, and Abe left it in the rain. To make up for his carelessness, Abe shucked corn for him for three days. All his life Abraham Lincoln made every effort to do the fair thing. He could never get enough to read. He said: “The things I want to know are in books. My best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.” Once he tramped nearly 20 miles to Rockport to borrow one.Storyteller, Ferryman, and Law “Listener”After supper Abe often walked down the road to Gentryville to join the “boys” at Gentry’s store. His humorous stories, sometimes told in dialect, were popular with the young men lounging against the log counter. He loved to imitate travelers and local characters and would throw back his head with a booming laugh. In his own speech he pronounced words as he had learned them on the Kentucky frontier, such as “cheer” for “chair” and “git” for “get.” That was the way all Southern woodsmen talked. Between farm chores he helped to run a ferry across the Ohio River to Kentucky. When he was 18 he built his own scow and rowed passengers over the shallows to steamers out in the river. Always he kept teaching himself new things. He became interested in law. Borrowing a book on the laws of Indiana, he studied it long into the night. He strode miles to the nearest courthouse to hear lawyers try cases. He even crossed into Kentucky to listen in court. Every visit taught him more about the ways of lawyers and furnished him with new stories. Throughout his later life as a lawyer, politician, and statesman he shrewdly drew on this rich fund of stories to make a legal point or to win audiences. Down the Mississippi to New OrleansWhen Abe was 19 he got his first chance to see something of the “outside world.” James Gentry, the owner of the country store, hired him to take a flatboat of cargo to New Orleans, then a wealthy city of some 40,000 people. With Gentry’s son, Allen, Abe cut timber, hewed great planks, and built a flatboat called a “broadhorn.”New Orleans was 1,000 miles down the twisting Mississippi River. From sunup to sundown the two brawny young men pulled the long oars–about 40 feet long at bow and stern. Often they hurriedly hauled back on the side sweeps to swing the boat from snags, clumsy flatboats, or trim steamers caught in the shifting currents. They lived on board, cooking and sleeping in a rickety lean-to on deck. At night they tied up to a tree or stump on the muddy bank. In New Orleans Abe saw his first auction of slaves. At that time slavery was lawful in all the United States south of the Ohio River. The tall, thoughtful young man winced at the sight of slave gangs in chains being marched off to plantations. Later he said, “Slavery is a continual torment to me.”To Illinois and Splitting RailsBack from New Orleans, Abe clerked part time at