there was much patient journeying back and forth with meal bags between
his father's cabin and the local mill. There was a little schooling,
very little, partly from Nancy Lincoln, partly from another good woman,
the miller's kind old mother, partly at the crudest of wayside schools
maintained very briefly by a wandering teacher who soon wandered on; but
out of this schooling very little result beyond the mastery of the A B
C.(8) And even at this age, a pathetic eagerness to learn, to invade the
wonder of the printed book! Also a marked keenness of observation. He
observed things which his elders overlooked. He had a better sense of
direction, as when he corrected his father and others who were taking
the wrong short-cut to a burning house. Cool, unexcitable, he was
capable of presence of mind. Once at night when the door of the cabin
was suddenly thrown open and a monster appeared on the threshold, a
spectral thing in the darkness, furry, with the head of an ox, Thomas
Lincoln shrank back aghast; little Abraham, quicker-sighted and
quicker-witted, slipped behind the creature, pulled at its furry mantle,
and revealed a forest Diana, a bold girl who amused herself playing
demon among the shadows of the moon.

Seven years passed and his eighth birthday approached. All this while
Thomas Lincoln had somehow kept his family in food, but never had he
money in his pocket. His successive farms, bought on credit, were never
paid for. An incurable vagrant, he came at last to the psychological
moment when he could no longer impose himself on his community. He must
take to the road in a hazard of new fortune. Indiana appeared to him
the land of promise. Most of his property--such as it was--except his
carpenter's tools, he traded for whisky, four hundred gallons. Somehow
he obtained a rattletrap wagon and two horses.

The family appear to have been loath to go. Nancy Lincoln had long been