So lived in Larue County, in the state of Kentucky, about fifty miles south of Louisville, Thomas Lincoln and his wife Nancy, in a rude log cabin with no windows, a dirt floor, and only a flapping bearskin for a door! In this humble abode, which they called home, there was born to them on February 12, 1809, a son, Abraham. The father was a strong and kindly man, and the mother was a woman rather above her lowly position in life, and well educated for the time and place. As her boy grew up she read to him stories from the Bible and taught him to read for himself. In after years, when Abraham Lincoln had gained the people's ear, men noticed that he scarcely made a speech or wrote a state paper in which there was not an 'illustration or a quotation from the Bible. He had been thoroughly instructed in it by his mother. It was the one book to which she, being a woman of deep religious feeling, turned for sympathy and guidance. Out of it she taught her boy to spell and read, and with its principles she so familiarized him that they always governed his after life. When Abraham was eight years old the family moved to Indiana, where, in about a year, his mother died. This was an unutterable grief to him, for he loved her most deeply and tenderly. Throughout his life he revered her memory, and when he was in his prime he said, "All that I am or hope to be, I owe to my mother." =300. How Lincoln learned to read Good Books.=--Young Lincoln attended school only six weeks. He was a tall, gaunt lad, and his long, stout arms were very useful to his father on the farm. Like Franklin, he had a hunger for books, and having none himself, he used to walk miles to some family to borrow them. Every evening he used to read by the log fire _Pilgrim's Progress_, the poems of Robert Burns, _The Life of Washington_, or _Plutarch's Lives_. Think of that boy sitting before the cabin fire, reading over and over the story of Washington; and then think of what he came to be. When the family went to bed he used to climb, on a rude ladder of stout pegs driven in the logs, up to his bed made of hay, and there, by the light of his tallow candle, would read over and over his precious books. He bought a biography of Washington with three hard days' work at twenty-five cents a day. He carried the book with him to the field, and read it at the noon hour and while the horse rested. [Illustration: LINCOLN READING HIS FAVORITE BOOKS BY THE FIRESIDE.] =301. Some Things Lincoln did when a Young Man.=--When Lincoln was about twenty-one, the family moved to Illinois. The young man was rugged and tall, six feet and four inches, but very strong. In feats of running, jumping, and wrestling he easily surpassed the best men in the county.