recorders of Lincoln's early days seems to have ended about his twelfth
year. At least, the vagrant suggestion disappeared. Though the life
that succeeded was void of luxury, though it was rough, even brutal,
dominated by a coarse, peasant-like view of things, it was scarcely by
peasant standards a life of hardship. There was food sufficient, if not
very good; protection from wind and weather; fire in the winter time;
steady labor; and social acceptance by the community of the creekside.
That the labor was hard and long, went without saying. But as to
that--as of the whippings in Kentucky--what else, from the peasant point
of view, would you expect? Abraham took it all with the same stoicism
with which he had once taken the whippings. By the unwritten law of the
creekside he was his father's property, and so was his labor, until
he came of age. Thomas used him as a servant or hired him out to
other farmers. Stray recollections show us young Abraham working as
a farm-hand for twenty-five cents the day, probably with "keep" in
addition; we glimpse him slaughtering hogs skilfully at thirty-one cents
a day, for this was "rough work." He became noted as an axman.

In the crevices, so to speak, of his career as a farm-hand, Abraham got
a few months of schooling, less than a year in all. A story that has
been repeated a thousand times shows the raw youth by the cabin fire
at night doing sums on the back of a wooden shovel, and shaving off its
surface repeatedly to get a fresh page. He devoured every book that came
his way, only a few to be sure, but generally great ones--the Bible,
of course, and Aesop, Crusoe, Pilgrim's Progress, and a few histories,
these last unfortunately of the poorer sort. He early displayed a bent
for composition, scribbling verses that were very poor, and writing
burlesque tales about his acquaintances in what passed for a Biblical
style.(2)