Читать книгу Why We Love Lincoln онлайн

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His stepmother sent him to school again for several months. In 1826, too, he walked nine miles a day to attend a log-house school. He had new companions at home now, a stepbrother, two stepsisters, and his cousins, John and Dennis Hanks.

As young Lincoln grew taller his skill and strength as a woodchopper and rail-splitter, and his willingness to do any kind of work, however drudging or menial—in spite of a natural meditative indolence—made him widely known. His kindly, helpful disposition and simple honesty gave him a distinct popularity, and he was much sought after as a companion, notwithstanding his ungainly figure and rough ways.

But it was his extraordinary thirst for knowledge, his efforts to raise himself out of the depths of ignorance, that showed the inner power struggling against adverse surroundings.

He grew to a height of six feet and four inches by the time he was seventeen years old. His legs and arms were long, his hands and feet big, and his skin was dry and yellow. His face was gaunt, and his melancholy gray eyes were sunk in cavernous sockets above his prominent cheek bones. A girl schoolmate has described him: “His shoes, when he had any, were low. He wore buckskin breeches, linsey-woolsey shirt, and a cap made of the skin of a squirrel or coon. His breeches were baggy and lacked by several inches meeting the tops of his shoes, thereby exposing his shin-bone, sharp, blue and narrow.”