the occasional newspaper; the rare lectures or political meetings; the
much more frequent religious meetings, with preachers who taught a grim
doctrine, but who preached with vigour and sometimes with the deepest
sincerity; the hymns often of great emotional power over a simple
congregation--Cowper's "There is a fountain filled with blood," is one
recorded favourite among them; the songs, far other than hymns, which
Dennis Hanks and his other mates would pick up or compose; and the
practice in rhetoric and the art of exposition, which he unblushingly
afforded himself before audiences of fellow labourers who welcomed the
jest and the excuse for stopping work. The achievement of the
self-taught man remains wonderful, but, if he surmounts his
difficulties at all, some of his limitations may turn to sheer
advantage. There is some advantage merely in being driven to make the
most of few books; great advantage in having one's choice restricted by
circumstances to good books; great advantage too in the consciousness
of untrained faculty which leaves a man capable in mature life of
deliberately undertaking mental discipline.

Along with the legends and authentic records of his self-training,
signs of an ambition which showed itself early and which was from the
first a clean and a high ambition, there are also other legends showing
Lincoln as a naughty boy among naughty boys. The selection here made
from these lacks refinement, and the reader must note that this was
literally a big, naughty boy, not a man who had grown stiff in
coarseness and ill-nature. First it must be recalled that Abraham bore
a grudge against the Grigsbys, an honourable grudge in its origin and
perhaps the only grudge he ever bore. There had arisen from this a
combat, of which the details might displease the fastidious, but which
was noble in so far that Abraham rescued a weaker combatant who was
over-matched. But there ensued something more displeasing, a series of