Abraham Lincoln

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE AWAKENING OF AMBITION Learning life's lessons and building character amid poverty, toil, and sorrow. ? Abraham starting to school at ten. ? Walking nine miles a day to and fro. ? Eager to study.?Ciphering on a wooden shovel and making notes on the logs of his cabin. ? His passion for books ? borrowing...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE AWAKENING OF AMBITION Learning life's lessons and building character amid poverty, toil, and sorrow. ? Abraham starting to school at ten. ? Walking nine miles a day to and fro. ? Eager to study.?Ciphering on a wooden shovel and making notes on the logs of his cabin. ? His passion for books ? borrowing and reading all the volumes within a fifty-mile circle. ? Working three days to pay for a damaged book. ? Only a few months' schooling in all. t was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up. There were some schools, so called, but no qualification was ever required of a teacher beyond 'readin', writin', and cipherin' to the rule of three.' If a straggler supposed to understand Latin happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, ' he was looked upon as a wizard. There was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education. ? Abraham Lincoln, in his own life sketch. Nevertheless it was in those backwoods of Indiana that the ambition of Lincoln was awakened. There, out of poverty and toil and sorrow, the sturdy nature of the child was woven, and there the man was born, sprung from the very earth. The wild forest was his university, and it taught him more thanmany boys learn in academic groves, for it taught him to use his hand as well as his head, and to think and act for himself. His mental growth was slow and did not cease while he lived; but morally, his character seemed to come almost to its full stature ( in mere boyhood. His noble stepmother insisted that all her children should be sent to school, though the fee for the teacher must have been a heavy burden for the Lincolns. The father knew nothing of school, and cared no more. To him it was a sheer waste of time, and he needed what the labor of the boys could earn. ...