Dennis used to like to tell of Abe's earliest ventures in the fields of literature: "His first readin' book was Webster's speller. Then he got hold of a book--I can't rickilect the name. It told about a feller, a nigger or suthin', that sailed a flatboat up to a rock, and the rock was magnetized and drawed the nails out of his boat, an' he got a duckin', or drownded, or suthin', I forget now. (This book, of course, was 'The Arabian Nights.') Abe would lay on the floor with a chair under his head, and laugh over them stories by the hour. I told him they was likely lies from end to end; but he learned to read right well in them." His stock of books was small, but they were the right kind--the Bible, "The Pilgrim's Progress," AEsop's Fables, "Robinson Crusoe," a history of the United States, and the Statutes of Indiana. This last was a strange book for a boy to read, but Abe pored over it as eagerly as a lad to-day might read "The Three Guardsmen," or "The Hound of the Baskervilles." He made notes of what he read with his turkey-buzzard pen and brier-root ink. If he did not have these handy, he would write with a piece of charcoal or the charred end of a stick, on a board, or on the under side of a chair or bench. He used the wooden fire shovel for a slate, shaving it off clean when both sides were full of figures. When he got hold of paper enough to make a copy-book he would go about transferring his notes from boards, beams, under sides of the chairs and the table, and from all the queer places he had put them down, on the spur of the moment. Besides the books he had at hand, he borrowed all he could get, often walking many miles for a book, until, as he once told a friend, he "read through every book he had ever heard of in that country, for a circuit of fifty miles"--quite a circulating library! "THE BEGINNING OF LOVE" "The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." It must have been about this time that the lad had the following experience, which he himself related to a legal friend, with his chair tilted back and his knees "cocked up" in the manner described by Cousin John Hanks: "Did you ever write out a story in your mind? I did when I was little codger. One day a wagon with a lady and two girls and a man broke down near us, and while they were fixing up, they cooked in our kitchen. The woman had books and read us stories, and they were the first of the kind I ever heard. I took a great fancy to one of the girls; and when they were gone I thought of her a good deal, and one day, when I was sitting out in the sun by the house, I wrote out a story in my mind. "I thought I took my father's horse and followed the wagon, and finally I found it, and they were surprised to see me. "I talked with the girl and persuaded her to elope with me; and that night I put her on my horse and we started off across the prairie. After several hours we came to a camp; and when we rode up we found it was one we had left a few hours before and went in.