moved to Indiana,” he went on, “when Abe was about nine.  Mr. Lincoln moved first, and built a camp of brush in Spencer County.  We came a year later, and he had then a cabin.  So he gave us the shanty.  Abe killed a turkey the day we got there, and couldn’t get through tellin’ about it.  The name was pronounced Linkhorn by the folks then.  We was all uneducated.  After a spell we learnt better.  I was the only boy in the place all them years, and Abe and me was always together.”

Dennis Hanks claims to have taught his young cousin to read, write, and cipher.  “He knew his letters pretty wellish, but no more.  His mother had taught him.  If ever there was a good woman on earth, she was one,—­a true Christian of the Baptist church.  But she died soon after we arrived, and Abe was left without a teacher.  His father couldn’t read a word.  The boy had only about one quarter of schooling, hardly that.  I then set in to help him.  I didn’t know much, but I did the best I could.  Sometimes he would write with a piece of charcoal or the p’int of a burnt stick on the fence or floor.  We got a little paper at the country town, and I made some ink out of blackberry briar-root and a little copperas in it.  It was black, but the copperas ate the paper after a while.  I made Abe’s first pen out of a turkey-buzzard feather.  We had no geese them days.  After he learned to write his name he was scrawlin’ it everywhere.  Sometimes he would write it in the white sand down by the crick bank and leave it there till the waves would blot it out.  He didn’t take to books in the beginnin’.  We had to hire him at first, but after he got a taste on’t it was the old story—­we had to pull the sow’s ears to get her to the trough, and then pull her tail to get her away.  He read a great deal, and had a wonderful memory—­wonderful.  Never forgot anything.”

Lincoln’s first reading book was Webster’s Speller.  “When I got him through that,” said Uncle Dennis, “I had only a copy of the Indiana Statutes.  Then Abe got hold of a book.  I can’t rikkilect the name.  It told a yarn about a feller, a nigger or suthin’, that sailed a flatboat up to a rock, and the rock was magnetized and drawed all the nails out, and he got a duckin’ or drowned or suthin’,—­I forget now. [It was the “Arabian Nights.”] Abe would lay on the floor with a chair under his head and laugh over them stories by the hour.  I told him they was likely lies from beginnin’ to end, but he learned to read right well in them.  I borrowed for him the Life of Washington and the Speeches of Henry Clay.  They had a powerful influence on him.  He told me afterwards in the White House he wanted to live like Washington.  His speeches show it, too.  But the other book did the most amazin’ work.  Abe was a Democrat, like his father and all of us, when he began to read it.  When he closed it he was a Whig, heart and soul, and he went on step by step till he became leader of the Republicans.”