Of the little Lincoln boy she said, "His mind and mine, what little I had, seemed to run together." She said that there had never been a cross word or look between them and that she loved the little fellow as her own child. One thing is sure, to the American people, Sarah Bush Lincoln has forever given a sacred meaning to the name stepmother and hallowed its duties near to the meaning of mother. In her old age she was visited by a biographer of Lincoln, to whom she said, "I had a son John, who was raised with Abe. Both were good boys, but I must say, both now being dead, that Abe was the best boy I ever saw, or expect to see." Lincoln's sister Sarah, or Nancy, as she was also called, was a noble girl and was of inestimable help to Mrs. Lincoln in the labors of a pioneer home. She was quick to learn and she did her share in helping her brother in his desire to learn. There was nothing remarkable about that brother, he was not wondrous, except in one thing, and that was his unceasing zeal to have a greater mind, and for that mind to be a right mind. His first real school life was to travel a deer path through the deep woods, nine miles each day, to school. He had no time to waste on useless knowledge. Josh Billings once exclaimed, lamenting, "What's the use of larnin' so much that ain't so." Lincoln thought there was no use in such foolishness, and he sought to fill his mind only with useful information, valuable toward a greater life. For instance, he got hold of a small dictionary and he read it through and through with the eagerness that many people give to baseball news or a novel. When the book called the "Statutes of Indiana" fell into his hands he could hardly eat or sleep till he had read it through. When he finally got hold of a grammar, it was no dry reading to him and no task. He literally devoured its information and committed its principles to memory, as a value of the finest wealth. He was indeed remarkable or wondrous in nothing but the divine inspiration to enlarge a useful mind. These are the minds that make life worth living and invariably characterize the builders of the world. It appears that the first approach of Lincoln to the formation of a life-ideal, his first patriotic vision of American citizenship, was derived from reading a life of Washington. A friendly neighbor loaned him the book. His book-shelf was a chink in the log house. One night it rained into his book-shelf and the next morning he found his borrowed book bucked up into a most unreadable shape. Lincoln's introduction to Washington was unhappy and significant. Trivial as the incident might seem, it supplies suggestions of character on the way of superior worth to civilization. Events, one by one, build up or tear down together the structure of self or of the public system.