“To-morror mornin’;” and the exacting manner in which he thus proceeded awakened Abraham’s contempt for him. Still he answered:—

“To-morrow morning it is, then; I’ll be on hand as early as you want to see me.”

Abraham hastened home and reported. His parents united with him in the opinion that it was one of Crawford’s acts of extortion. Still, they were glad that their son could settle the affair in some way.

Abraham undertook to redeem his pledge on the next day, and, bright and early, he was in Crawford’s corn-field. There were several acres of the corn, and several days of very hard work would be required to finish the job. Abraham bent himself to the task with more than usual determination, and completed it in about three days, although, ordinarily, a man would have needed nearly five days in which to perform the work.

Abraham never forgot the extortion which Crawford practised upon him, and he always despised his over-reaching propensity. Still, he was glad to own another volume, especially one of so much value as Weems’s Life of Washington. That Crawford forgot his own meanness is quite evident from the fact that, subsequently, he sought Abraham’s services, and those of his sister, to assist his wife. Both Abraham and Sarah were glad of the opportunity to earn an honest dollar, and accepted his proposition. They lived with Crawford several months during that year, and pleased the crabbed old fellow mightily. Abraham finished his log-house by “daubing it,” that is, filling the interstices between the unhewn logs with clay, especially the loft in which he lodged.

He split many rails for Crawford during that season, planted, sowed, and harvested, receiving only twenty- five cents a day. If he lost only a few minutes from hard work, as he would on some days, his employer deducted it from his small wages, thereby exposing his contemptible spirit, though Abraham never protested.

Abraham might not have remained at Crawford’s during the whole season but for the presence of his sister there, and his high respect for Mrs. Crawford, who was an excellent woman; “nothing that her husband was, and everything that he was not.”

He found several books there which he had never seen before; and these he read over and over at night. One of them was the “Kentucky Preceptor,” which he pored over with unusual interest, because it contained dialogues and declamations. Many of these he committed to memory; indeed, when his time was up at Crawford’s, he had no need to carry away the books, for the contents of them were in his head. Although his employer paid him little more than half of what the boy ought to have had, it proved to be a good place for him on account of the books that he used for his own personal improvement.

Josiah Crawford was as homely as he was ill-tempered. The lids of his eyes were red as a lobster’s claw, and his nose was considerably longer than it should have been for symmetry and beauty; and what was worse yet, a bad habit had pimpled and reddened the end of it as if purposely to make him ugly- looking. Abraham celebrated the characteristics of Crawford’s nose in verse, some time after he ceased labouring for him, perhaps the following winter. Afterwards, when he was indulging his gift for “Chronicles,” he embalmed the memory of it in that style of composition. These literary efforts spread both the fame of Crawford’s nose and the talents of the writer. How widely the subject-matter of his “verse” and “chronicles” were discussed and enjoyed, is learned from the fact that one of his biographers says that the fame of Crawford’s nose spread “as wide as to the Wabash and the Ohio.” We cite the incident only to show that Abraham wielded a facile pen at that early day, and that the people regarded him as a marvellous boy.

Mrs. Josiah Crawford records a curious incident concerning Abraham. During the season he worked for her husband, he frequently lingered after dinner to have a frolic with the girls in the kitchen. One day he became unusually boisterous, when Mrs. Crawford reproved him for “fooling,” and asked, “What do you think will ever become of you?” Abraham replied promptly, “Be President of the United States.” Nor was this the only occasion of his making a similar remark. He often used it in his boyhood and youth.