“Abe didn’t do that!” answered the neighbour.

“I did do it with a stick,” said the boy.

“What is it?” The man couldn’t read.

“It’s my name.”

“Your name, hey? Likely story.”

“Well, ’tis, whether you believe it or not;” and he proceeded to spell it out,—“A-B-R-A-H-A-M L-I-N-C-O- L-N.”

“Sure enough it is; and you certainly did it, Abe?”

“Yes, sir; and I will do it again, if you want to see me;” and, without waiting for an answer, he caught up a stick and wrote his name again in the dirt.

“There ’tis,” said Abraham.

“I see it, and it’s well done,” answered the neighbour.

And there, on the soil of Indiana, Abraham Lincoln wrote his name, with a stick, in large characters,—a sort of prophetic act, that students of history may love to ponder. For, since that day, he has written his name, by public acts, on the annals of every State in the Union.

From the time, however, that Abraham became absorbed in The Pilgrim’s Progress and Æsop’s Fables, he was subject to the charge of being “lazy.” The charge gained force, too, as he grew older, and more books and increasing thirst for knowledge controlled him. Dennis Hanks said: “Abe was lazy, very lazy. He was always reading, scribbling, ciphering, writing poetry, and such like.” John Romine declared that “Abe was awful lazy. He worked for me; was always reading and thinking; I used to get mad at him. He worked for me pulling fodder. I say Abe was awful lazy. He would laugh and talk, and crack jokes, and tell stories all the time; didn’t love work, but did dearly love his pay. He worked for me frequently, a few days only at a time. He said to me one day, that his father taught him to work, but never learned him to love it.”

Mrs. Crawford, for whose husband Abraham worked, and in whose cabin he read and told stories, said: “Abe was no hand to pitch into work like killing snakes.” At the same time Mr. Crawford could find no man to suit him as well as Abraham, when the latter was but fifteen years of age.

We protest, here and now, against this charge of laziness which some biographers have made so prominent. Nothing was ever more common than to charge studious boys and girls with laziness. A great many men and women, who know no better, bring the same charge against professional gentlemen. Any person who is not obliged to work on the farm, or at the forge, or engaged in some other manual labour, for a livelihood, they pronounce lazy and aristocratic. Through sheer ignorance, studying and literary aspirations are regarded as proof of laziness. It was so in Abraham’s time. Because he possessed talents that craved knowledge as the appetite craves food, leading him to snatch fragments of time for reading, and perhaps to devote hours to the bewitching pastime that ought to have been given to hard work, careless, ignorant observers called him “lazy.” It is a base slander. There was not a lazy bone in him. The boy who will improve such bits of time as he can save from his daily toil for study, and sit up nights to read the Life of Washington, or master a problem of mathematics, is not lazy. He may love a book more than he loves chopping or threshing, just as another may love the latter more than he does the former; but he is not lazy. Laziness wastes the spare hours of the day in bringing nothing to pass, and gives the night to sleep instead of mental improvement. As many of the busiest and most cheerful workers in our country are its scholars, without a particle of the element of laziness in their composition, so many of