been strangers during the whole of their young lives. Under her
wise management all jealousy was avoided between the two sets of
children; urged on by her stirring example, Thomas Lincoln
supplied the yet unfinished cabin with floor, door, and windows,
and life became more comfortable for all its inmates, contentment
if not happiness reigning in the little home.

The new stepmother quickly became very fond of Abraham, and
encouraged him in every way in her power to study and improve
himself. The chances for this were few enough. Mr. Lincoln has
left us a vivid picture of the situation. "It was," he once
wrote, "a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals
still in the woods. There I grew up. There were some schools,
so-called, but no qualification was ever required of a teacher
beyond "readin', writin', and cipherin'" to the Rule of Three. If
a straggler supposed to understand Latin happened to sojourn in
the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizard."

The school-house was a low cabin of round logs, with split logs
or "puncheons" for a floor, split logs roughly leveled with an ax
and set up on legs for benches, and holes cut out in the logs and
the space filled in with squares of greased paper for
window-panes. The main light came in through the open door. Very
often Webster's "Elementary Spelling-book" was the only
text-book. This was the kind of school most common in the middle
West during Mr. Lincoln's boyhood, though already in some places
there were schools of a more pretentious character. Indeed, back
in Kentucky, at the very time that Abraham, a child of six, was
learning his letters from Zachariah Riney, a boy only a year
older was attending a Catholic seminary in the very next county.