But it was not all work for Abe on the new farm in Indiana. He picked wild plums and pawpaws in the woods, and ate corn dodgers, fried bacon, roast wild turkey, and fish caught in the Indiana streams. He went to school when he could, which was not often, for in those days schools were few and far between, and teachers were not many. But little Abe had the best teacher of all, his mother, Nancy Lincoln. For, though his father could scarcely write his own name, his mother could read, and she loved books. She taught her little son his letters and how to read. Often they sat together in the cabin, Abe and his sister at their mother’s knee, while she read the Bible to them. “I would rather my son would be able to read the Bible, than to own a farm, if he can’t have but one,” she said. She was a beautiful woman, slender, sad, and pale, with dark hair. She was more refined than most women of those hardy pioneer times, but she could use a rifle, work on the farm, spin, and do other housework. Because of her gentle and firm character, she was loved and respected not only by her husband and children, but by her neighbours. Above all things she had a deep and tender religious spirit which she shared with Abe and his sister, Sarah. She taught Abe to love truth and justice and to revere God. In time he could repeat by heart much of the Bible, and, when he grew up, he thought and wrote in the simple, clear, and forceful language of the Bible. And he learned from it his ideas of right and his scorn of wrong, making him “Honest Abe.” OFF TO NEW ORLEANS Young Abe Lincoln went on several flatboat trips carrying produce down the Mississippi to New Orleans. One of these trips made a deep and lasting impression upon him. In New Orleans, he visited the slave-market. There negro men, women, and children were bought, sold, and flogged. Wives were torn from their husbands, children from their mothers, and auctioned off like cattle. The anguish of these scenes wrung Lincoln’s heartstrings. With quivering lips, he said, “If ever I get a chance to hit that thing, I will hit it hard.” John Hanks, a relative who was with him at the slave-market, said in after years:-- “Lincoln saw it; his heart bled; said nothing much, was silent, looked bad. I can say it, knowing him, that it was on this trip that he formed his opinions of slavery. It run its iron into him, then and there.” THE KINDNESS OF LINCOLN _The Little Birds_ When Lincoln was a lawyer, one day he was going with a party of lawyers to attend court. They were riding, two by two, on horseback through a country lane, Lincoln in the rear. As they passed through a thicket of wild plum and crab-apple trees, his friends missed him. “Where is he?” they asked. Just then Lincoln’s companion came riding up. “Oh,” replied he, “when I saw him last, he had caught two young birds that the wind had blown out of their nest, and was hunting for the nest to put them back.”