the most industrious and noble boys are those who prefer a book to the plough and would rather go to school than to harvesting. That was true of Abraham Lincoln. His heart was set on books; but his hands were so ready for hard work that any farmer was glad to hire him at the age of fourteen of fifteen, because he would do more work than any youth of his age. He would chop more wood in a day, lift larger logs, and “pull more fodder,” boy as he was, than half the men who hired him.

True, from the time that John Baldwin, the blacksmith, came into the neighbourhood, when Abraham was about ten years old, he would steal away to the smithy’s shop to listen to his stories. John was a great story-teller, and he was fond of children also, and these were attractions enough for such a precocious boy. His mind yearned for thoughts; it was desperate for entertainment; and the blacksmith’s stories, and incidents of his life, supplied both thoughts and entertainment. He spent much time with this jolly son of Vulcan before he began to tell stories himself, and, after that he exchanged them with the smutty toiler at the forge. But there was no evidence of laziness in those visits to the blacksmith’s shop. And when we place this freak of a singularly bright boy, together with all his other acts that denoted laziness to the ignorant pioneers, beside the fact that in manhood, to the day of his death, Abraham Lincoln was one of the hardest workers who ever lived, both at manual and intellectual labour, ignoring all ten hour systems, and toiling fifteen, sixteen, and even eighteen hours a day, to satisfy his honourable ambition, the charge of laziness is branded as slander on the part of those who make it. “The boy is father to the man,”—the lazy boy makes the lazy man, and vice versâ. If Abraham was a lazy boy, his manhood completely belied his youth, and the old maxim is exploded.

We have seen that they who called him lazy coupled the charge with the statement that he was always “reading and thinking,” evidently considering that his love of books was proof of a disposition to shirk labour. Their ignorance is the explanation of, and excuse for, their charge.

We have made this digression, at this point, in order to direct the attention of the reader to an important element of Lincoln’s character, that will find ample support in the sequel.

Now that we are speaking of Abraham’s books, we may record the facts about two other volumes, that came into his hands within two years after Æsop’s Fables. They were Ramsay’s Life of Washington, and Robinson Crusoe.

Dennis Hanks came home one day and said to Abraham,—

“Don’t you want to read the life of Washington?”

“Of course I do,” was his reply. “What do you ask me that for?”

“Because I’ve seen one.”

“Where?”

“Down at Anderson’s Creek.”

“Who did it belong to?”

Dennis told him, adding, “He offered to lend it to me.”

“Then I can borrow it?”

“Any time you are there; there’s no doubt of it.”

Without recording the details of this affair, it will answer our purpose to say that Abraham embraced the first opportunity to secure the loan of that valuable biography. He knew that Washington was called the “father of his country”—that he was Commander-in-chief of the army in the American Revolution. He had been told, also, of the part his grandfather took in the “war of independence.” This was all he