much of his land under cultivation. His principal crop was corn; and
this, with the game which a rifleman so expert would easily take from
the woods around him, supplied his table." It does not appear that he
employed any of his mechanical skill in completing and furnishing his
own cabin. It has already been stated that the latter had no window,
door or floor. "But the furniture, if it might be called furniture, was
even worse than the house. Three-legged stools served for chairs. A
bedstead was made of poles stuck in the cracks of the logs in one corner
of the cabin, while the other end rested in the crotch of a forked stick
stuck in the earthen floor. On these were laid some boards, and on the
boards a shake-down of leaves, covered with skins and old petticoats.
The table was a hewed puncheon supported by four legs. They had a few
pewter and tin dishes to eat from, but the most minute inventory of
their effects makes no mention of knives or forks. Their cooking
utensils were a Dutch oven and a skillet. Abraham slept in the loft, to
which he ascended by means of pins driven into holes in the wall." Of
his father's disposition, Abraham seems to have inherited at all events
the dislike to labour, though his sounder moral nature prevented him
from being an idler. His tendency to politics came from the same element
of character as his father's preference for the rifle. In after life we
are told his mind "was filled with gloomy forebodings and strong
apprehensions of impending evil, mingled with extravagant visions of
personal grandeur and power." His melancholy, characterized by all his
friends as "terrible," was closely connected with the cravings of his
demagogic ambition, and the root of both was in him from a boy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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