Mr. Crawford, it seems, was a martinet in spelling, and one day he was going to punish a whole class for failing to spell _defied_, when Lincoln telegraphed the right letter to a young lady by putting his finger with a significant smile to his eye. Many years later, however, and after his entrance into public life, Lincoln himself spelt _apology_ with a double p, _planning_ with a single n, and _very_ with a double r. His schooling was very irregular, his school days hardly amounting to a year in all, and such education as he had was picked up afterwards by himself. His appetite for mental food, however, was always strong, and he devoured all the books, few and not very select, which could be found in the neighbourhood of "Pigeon Creek." Equally strong was his passion for stump oratory, the taste for which pervades the American people, even in the least intellectual districts, as the taste for church festivals pervades the people of Spain, or the taste for cricket the people of England. Abe's neighbour, John Romine, says, "he was awful lazy. He worked for me; was always reading and thinking; used to get mad at him. He worked for me in 1829, pulling fodder. I say Abe was awful lazy, he would laugh and talk, and crack jokes all the time, didn't love work, but did dearly love his pay." He liked to lie under a shade tree, or up in the loft of the cabin and read, cipher, or scribble. At night he ciphered by the light of the fire on the wooden fire shovel. He practised stump oratory by repeating the sermons, and sometimes by preaching himself to his brothers and sister. His gifts in the rhetorical line were high; when it was announced in the harvest field that Abe had taken the stump, work was at an end. The lineaments of the future politician distinctly appear in the dislike of manual labour as well as in the rest. We shall presently have Lincoln's own opinion on that point. Abe's first written composition appears to have been an essay against cruelty to animals, a theme the choice of which was at once indicative of his kindness of heart and practically judicious, since the young gentlemen in the neighbourhood were in the habit of catching terrapins and putting hot coals upon their backs. The essay appears not to have been preserved, and we cannot say whether its author succeeded in explaining that ethical mystery--the love of cruelty in boys. In spite of his laziness, Abe was greatly in demand at hog-killing time, notwithstanding, or possibly in consequence of which, he contracted a peculiarly tender feeling towards swine, and in later life would get off his horse to help a struggling hog out of the mire or to save a little pig from the jaws of an unnatural mother.