“Every lull in his daily labor he used for reading, rarely going to his work without a book.  When plowing or cultivating the rough fields of Spencer County, he found frequently a half hour for reading, for at the end of every long row the horse was allowed to rest, and Lincoln had his book out and was perched on stump or fence, almost as soon as the plow had come to a standstill.  One of the few people left in Gentryville who still remembers Lincoln, Captain John Lamar, tells to this day of riding to mill with his father, and seeing, as they drove along, a boy sitting on the top rail of an old-fashioned, stake-and-rider worm fence, reading so intently that he did not notice their approach.  His father, turning to him, said:  ’John, look at that boy yonder, and mark my words, he will make a smart man out of himself.  I may not see it, but you’ll see if my words don’t come true.’  ’That boy was Abraham Lincoln,’ adds Mr. Lamar, impressively.”

Lincoln’s father was illiterate, and had no sympathy with his son’s efforts to educate himself.  Fortunately for him, however, his stepmother helped and encouraged him in every way possible.  Shortly before her death she said to a biographer of Lincoln:  “I induced my husband to permit Abe to read and study at home, as well as at school.  At first he was not easily reconciled to it, but finally he too seemed willing to encourage him to a certain extent.  Abe was a dutiful son to me always, and we took particular care when he was reading not to disturb him,—­would let him read on and on till he quit of his own accord.”

Lincoln fully appreciated his stepmother’s sympathy and love for him, and returned them in equal measure.  It added greatly to his enjoyment of his reading and studies to have some one to whom he could talk about them, and in after life he always gratefully remembered what his second mother did for him in those early days of toil and effort.

If there was a book to be borrowed anywhere in his neighborhood, he was sure to hear about it and borrow it if possible.  He said himself that he “read through every book he had ever heard of in that county for a circuit of fifty miles.”

And how he read!  Boys who have books and magazines and papers in abundance in their homes, besides having thousands of volumes to choose from in great city libraries, can have no idea of what a book meant to this boy in the wilderness.  He devoured every one that came into his hands as a man famishing from hunger devours a crust of bread.  He read and re-read it until he had made the contents his own.

“From everything he read,” says Miss Tarbell, “he made long extracts, with his turkey-buzzard pen and brier-root ink.  When he had no paper he would write on a board, and thus preserve his selections until he secured a copybook.  The wooden fire shovel was his usual slate, and on its back he ciphered with a charred stick, shaving it off when it had become too grimy for use.  The logs and boards in his vicinity he covered with his figures and quotations.  By night he read and worked as long as there was light, and he kept a book in the crack of the logs in his loft to have it at hand at peep of day.  When acting as ferryman on the Ohio in his nineteenth year, anxious, no doubt, to get through the books of the house where he boarded before he left the place, he read every night until midnight.”