It is doubtful if they ever met, but the destinies of the two
were strangely interwoven, for the older boy was Jefferson Davis,
who became head of the Confederate government shortly after
Lincoln was elected President of the United States.

As Abraham had been only seven years old when he left Kentucky,
the little beginnings he learned in the schools kept by Riney and
Hazel in that State must have been very slight, probably only his
alphabet, or at most only three or four pages of Webster's
"Elementary Spelling-book." The multiplication-table was still a
mystery to him, and he could read or write only the words he
spelled. His first two years in Indiana seem to have passed
without schooling of any sort, and the school he attended shortly
after coming under the care of his stepmother was of the simplest
kind, for the Pigeon Creek settlement numbered only eight or ten
poor families, and they lived deep in the forest, where, even if
they had had the money for such luxuries, it would have been
impossible to buy books, slates, pens, ink, or paper. It is
worthy of note, however, that in our western country, even under
such difficulties, a school-house was one of the first buildings
to rise in every frontier settlement. Abraham's second school in
Indiana was held when he was fourteen years old, and the third in
his seventeenth year. By that time he had more books and better
teachers, but he had to walk four or five miles to reach them. We
know that he learned to write, and was provided with pen, ink,
and a copy-book, and a very small supply of writing-paper, for
copies have been printed of several scraps on which he carefully
wrote down tables of long measure, land measure, and dry measure,
as well as examples in multiplication and compound division, from
his arithmetic. He was never able to go to school again after