“Good boys who to their books apply, Will all be great men by and by.” In all, Lincoln’s “schooling” did not amount to a year’s time, but he was a constant student outside of the schoolhouse. He read all the books he could borrow, and it was his chief delight during the day to lie under the shade of some tree, or at night in front of an open fireplace, reading and studying. His favorite books were the Bible and Aesop’s fables, which he kept always within reach and read time and again. The first law book he ever read was “The Statutes of Indiana,” and it was from this work that he derived his ambition to be a lawyer. MADE SPEECHES WHEN A BOY. When he was but a barefoot boy he would often make political speeches to the boys in the neighborhood, and when he had reached young manhood and was engaged in the labor of chopping wood or splitting rails he continued this practice of speech-making with only the stumps and surrounding trees for hearers. At the age of seventeen he had attained his full height of six feet four inches and it was at this time he engaged as a ferry boatman on the Ohio river, at thirty-seven cents a day. That he was seriously beginning to think of public affairs even at this early age is shown by the fact that about this time he wrote a composition on the American Government, urging the necessity for preserving the Constitution and perpetuating the Union. A Rockport lawyer, by the name of Pickert, who read this composition, declared that “the world couldn’t beat it.” When the dreaded disease, known as the “milk-sick” created such havoc in Indiana in 1829, the father of Abraham Lincoln, who was of a roving disposition, sought and found a new home in Illinois, locating near the town of Decatur, in Macon county, on a bluff overlooking the Sangamon river. A short time thereafter Abraham Lincoln came of age, and having done his duty to his father, began life on his own account. His first employer was a man named Denton Offut, who engaged Lincoln, together with his step-brother and John Hanks, to take a boat-load of stock and provisions to New Orleans. Offut was so well pleased with the energy and skill that Lincoln displayed on this trip that he engaged him as clerk in a store which Offut opened a few months later at New Salem. It was while clerking for Offut that Lincoln performed many of those marvelous feats of strength for which he was noted in his youth, and displayed his wonderful skill as a wrestler. In addition to being six feet four inches high he now weighed two hundred and fourteen pounds. And his strength and skill were so great combined that he could out-wrestle and out-lift any man in that section of the country.