“Humph!” Tom grunted.  “There ain’t any school for him to go to.  Anyway, he wastes enough time as ’tis.  He’s always got his nose buried in those books you brought.”

“That bothers me, too.  I saw you cuff him the other day because he was reading.”

“I had to, Sairy.  I told him to come out and chop some wood, but he up and laughed in my face.”

“He wasn’t laughing at you, Tom.  He was laughing at Sinbad.”

“Who in tarnation is Sinbad?”

“A fellow in one of his books.  Abe said that Sinbad sailed his flatboat up to a rock, and the rock was magnetized and pulled all the nails out of his boat.  Then Sinbad fell into the water.”

“That’s what I mean,” Tom exploded.  “Dennis told him that book was most likely lies, but Abe keeps on reading it.  Where is all this book learning going to get him?  More’n I ever had.”

“Maybe the Lord meant for young ones to be smarter than their parents,” said Sarah, “or the world might never get any better.”

Tom shook his head in dismay.  “Women and their fool notions!  If I don’t watch out, you’ll be spoiling the boy more’n his own mammy did.”

Sarah’s cheeks were red as she bent over her knitting.  Tom was right about one thing.  There was no school for Abe to go to.  But some day there would be.  Every few weeks another clearing was made in the forest, and the neighbors gathered for a “house raising” to help put up a cabin.  Then smoke would rise from a new chimney, and another new home would be started in the wilderness.

With so many new settlers, there was usually plenty of work for Abe.  Whenever Tom did not need him at home, he hired out at twenty-five cents a day.  He gave this money to his father.  That was the law, Tom said.  Not until Abe was twenty-one would he be allowed to keep his wages for himself.  As a hired boy, he plowed corn, chopped wood, and did all kinds of chores.  He did not like farming, but he managed to have fun.

“Pa taught me to work,” Abe told one farmer who had hired him, “but he never taught me to love it.”

The farmer scratched his head.  He couldn’t understand a boy who was always reading, and if Abe wasn’t reading he was telling jokes.  The farmer thought that Abe was lazy.

“Sometimes,” the farmer said, “I get awful mad at you, Abe Lincoln.  You crack your jokes and spin your yarns, if you want to, while the men are eating their dinner.  But don’t you keep them from working.”

The other farm hands liked to gather around Abe when they stopped to eat their noon meal.  Sometimes he would stand on a tree stump and “speechify.”  The men would become so interested that they would be late getting back to the fields.  Other times he would tell them stories that he had read in books or that he had heard from some traveler who had passed through Pigeon Creek.  He nearly always had a funny story to tell.

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