Excerpt from The Notable History of Abraham Lincoln, Sixteenth President of the United States

In that _log cabin, on the twelfth day of February, in the year 1809, a little baby wasfloor, it had none of the things you have in your pleasant homes. In all America no baby was ever born with fewer comforts and poorer surroundings than little Abraham Lincoln. He grew from a baby to a homely little boy, and to a homelier-looking young man. He was tall and thin and gawky. His clothes never fitted him; he never, in all his life, went to school but a year; he had to work hard, he could play but little, and, many a day, he knew what it was to be cold and hungry and almost homeless.

His father kept moving about from place to place, living almost always in the woods, in Kentucky and Indiana and Illinois. Sometimes their home would be a log cabin, sometimes it was just a hut with only three sides boarded up, and little Abraham Lincoln was a neglected and forlorn little fellow.

His mother died when he was only eight years old. Then Abraham and his sister, Sarah, were worse off than ever. But pretty soon his father married a second wife, and Abraham's new mother was a good and wise woman.

She washed him and gave him new clothes; she taught him how to make the most and do the best with the few things he had and the chances that came to him; she made him wish for better things; she helped him fix himself up, and encouraged him to read and study.

This last was what Abraham liked most of all, and he was reading and studying all the time. There were not many books where he lived, but he borrowed all he could lay his hands on, and read them over and over.

He studied all the hard things he could find books on, from arithmetic and grammar to surveying and law. He wrote on a shingle, when he could not get paper, and by the light of a log fire, when he could not get candles. He read and studied in the fields, when he was not working; on wood-piles, where he was chopping wood, or in the kitchen, rocking the cradle of any baby whose father or mother had a book to lend him. His favorite position for studying was to lay, stretched out like the long boy he was, flat on the floor, in front of an Open fire. Here he would read and write and cipher, after the day's work was over, until, at last, he grew to be as good a scholar as any boy round.

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