His stepmother said:  “He read everything he could lay his hands on, and when he came across a passage that struck him, he would write it down on boards if he had no paper, and keep it by him until he could get paper.  Then he would copy it, look at it, commit it to memory, and repeat it.”

His thoroughness in mastering everything he undertook to study was a habit acquired in childhood.  How he acquired this habit he tells himself.  “Among my earliest recollections I remember how, when a mere child,” he says, “I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand.  I do not think I ever got angry at anything else in my life; but that always disturbed my temper, and has ever since.  I can remember going to my little bedroom, after hearing the neighbors talk of an evening with my father, and spending no small part of the night walking up and down and trying to make out what was the exact meaning of some of their—­to me—­dark sayings.

“I could not sleep, although I tried to, when I got on such a hunt for an idea until I had caught it; and when I thought I had got it, I was not satisfied until I had repeated it over and over; until I had put it in language plain enough, as I thought, for any boy I knew to comprehend.  This was a kind of passion with me, and it has stuck by me; for I am never easy now when I am handling a thought, till I have bounded it north and bounded it south and bounded it east and bounded it west.”

With all his hard study, reading, and thinking, Lincoln was not a bookworm, nor a dull companion to the humble, unschooled people among whom his youth was spent.  On the contrary, although he was looked up to as one whose acquirements in “book learning” had raised him far above every one in his neighborhood, he was the most popular youth in all the country round.  No “husking bee,” or “house raising” or merry-making of any kind was complete if Abraham was not present.  He was witty, ready of speech, a good story-teller, and had stored his memory with a fund of humorous anecdotes, which he always used to good purpose and with great effect.  He had committed to memory, and could recite all the poetry in the various school readers used at that time in the log-cabin schoolhouse.  He could make rhymes himself, and even make impromptu speeches that excited the admiration of his hearers.  He was the best wrestler, jumper, runner, and the strongest of all his young companions.  Even when a mere youth he could lift as much as three full-grown men; and, “if you heard him fellin’ trees in a clearin’,” said his cousin, Dennis Hanks, “you would say there was three men at work by the way the trees fell.  His ax would flash and bite into a sugar tree or sycamore, and down it would come.”

His kindness and tenderness of heart were as great as his strength and agility.  He loved all God’s creatures, and cruelty to any of them always aroused his indignation.  Only once did he ever attempt to kill any of the game in the woods, which the family considered necessary for their subsistence.  He refers to this occasion in an autobiography, written by him in the third person, in the year 1860.