Thirteen months after the death of his Nancy, Thomas Lincoln went to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, and suddenly presented himself to Mrs. Sally Johnston, who had in former days rejected him for a better match, but had become a widow. "Well, Mrs. Johnston, I have no wife and you have no husband, I came a purpose to marry you. I knowed you from a gal and you knowed me from a boy. I have no time to lose, and if you are willin', let it be done straight off." "Tommy, I know you well, and have no objection to marrying you; but I cannot do it straight off, as I owe some debts that must first be paid." They were married next morning, and the new Mrs. Lincoln, who owned, among other wondrous household goods, a bureau that cost forty dollars, and who had been led, it seems, to believe that her new husband was reformed and a prosperous farmer, was conveyed with her bureau to the smiling scene of his reformation and prosperity. Being, however, a sensible Christian woman, she made the best of a bad bargain, got her husband to put down a floor and hang doors and windows, made things generally decent, and was very kind to the children, especially to Abe, to whom she took a great liking, and who owed to his good stepmother what other heroes have owed to their mothers. "From that time on," according to his garrulous relative, Dennis Hanks, "he appeared to lead a new life." It seems to have been difficult to extract from him "for campaign purposes" the incidents of his life before it took this happy turn. He described his own education in a Congressional handbook as "defective." In Kentucky he occasionally trudged with his little sister, rather as an escort than as a school-fellow, to a school four miles off, kept by one Caleb Hazel, who could teach reading and writing after a fashion, and a little arithmetic, but whose great qualification for his office lay in his power and readiness "to whip the big boys." So far the American respect for popular education as the key to success in life prevailed even in those wilds, and in such a family as that of Thomas Lincoln.