Nancy was not long without a successor.  Thomas Lincoln, the next year, journeyed back to Kentucky and returned in triumph to Indiana, bringing as his wife, an old flame of his who had married, had been widowed, and was of a mind for further adventures.  This Sarah Bush Lincoln, of less distinction than Nancy, appears to have been steadier-minded and stronger-willed.  Even before this, Thomas had left the half-faced camp and moved into a cabin.  But such a cabin!  It had neither door, nor window, nor floor.  Sally Lincoln required her husband to make of it a proper house—­by the standards of Pigeon Creek.  She had brought with her as her dowry a wagonload of furniture.  These comforts together with her strong will began a new era of relative comfort in the Lincoln cabin.(1)

Sally Lincoln was a kind stepmother to Abraham who became strongly attached to her.  In the rough and nondescript community of Pigeon Creek, a world of weedy farms, of miserable mud roads, of log farm-houses, the family life that was at least tolerable.  The sordid misery described during her regime emerged from wretchedness to a state of by all the recorders of Lincoln’s early days seems to have ended about his twelfth year.  At least, the vagrant suggestion disappeared.  Though the life that succeeded was void of luxury, though it was rough, even brutal, dominated by a coarse, peasant-like view of things, it was scarcely by peasant standards a life of hardship.  There was food sufficient, if not very good; protection from wind and weather; fire in the winter time; steady labor; and social acceptance by the community of the creekside.  That the labor was hard and long, went without saying.  But as to that—­as of the whippings in Kentucky—­what else, from the peasant point of view, would you expect?  Abraham took it all with the same stoicism with which he had once taken the whippings.  By the unwritten law of the creekside he was his father’s property, and so was his labor, until he came of age.  Thomas used him as a servant or hired him out to other farmers.  Stray recollections show us young Abraham working as a farm-hand for twenty-five cents the day, probably with “keep” in addition; we glimpse him slaughtering hogs skilfully at thirty-one cents a day, for this was “rough work.”  He became noted as an axman.

In the crevices, so to speak, of his career as a farm-hand, Abraham got a few months of schooling, less than a year in all.  A story that has been repeated a thousand times shows the raw youth by the cabin fire at night doing sums on the back of a wooden shovel, and shaving off its surface repeatedly to get a fresh page.  He devoured every book that came his way, only a few to be sure, but generally great ones—­the Bible, of course, and Aesop, Crusoe, Pilgrim’s Progress, and a few histories, these last unfortunately of the poorer sort.  He early displayed a bent for composition, scribbling verses that were very poor, and writing burlesque tales about his acquaintances in what passed for a Biblical style.(2)