She was good to the Lincoln orphans whose mother lay out in the wild forest grave. She gave them warm clothes. She threw away the mat of corn husks and leaves on which they slept and replaced it with a soft feather tick. She loved little Abe, and the lonely boy returned her kindness and affection. In a primitive cabin, set in the midst of a savage country, she created that noblest and best result of a good woman’s heart and brain, a happy home. Oh, pale woman of the twentieth century, sighing for a mission in the great world’s affairs! Perhaps there may be a suggestion for you in the simple story of what Sarah Bush did for Abraham Lincoln and, through him, for the ages. Did not the two malaria-racked and care-driven mothers who lived in the rough-hewn Lincoln cabin do more to influence the political institutions of mankind than all the speeches and votes of women since voting was first invented? III Even at the age of ten years the frontier lad was a hard worker. When he was not wielding the axe in the forest, he was driving the horses, threshing, ploughing, assisting his father as a carpenter. He also “hired out” to the neighbors as ploughboy, hostler, water-carrier, baby-minder or doer of odd chores, at twenty-five cents a day. He suddenly began to grow tall, and there was no stronger youth in the community than the lank, loose-limbed boy in deerskins, linsey-woolsey, and coonskin cap, who could make an axe bite so deep into a tree. His stepmother sent him to school again for several months. In 1826, too, he walked nine miles a day to attend a log-house school. He had new companions at home now, a stepbrother, two stepsisters, and his cousins, John and Dennis Hanks. As young Lincoln grew taller his skill and strength as a woodchopper and rail-splitter, and his willingness to do any kind of work, however drudging or menial--in spite of a natural meditative indolence--made him widely known. His kindly, helpful disposition and simple honesty gave him a distinct popularity, and he was much sought after as a companion, notwithstanding his ungainly figure and rough ways. But it was his extraordinary thirst for knowledge, his efforts to raise himself out of the depths of ignorance, that showed the inner power struggling against adverse surroundings. He grew to a height of six feet and four inches by the time he was seventeen years old. His legs and arms were long, his hands and feet big, and his skin was dry and yellow. His face was gaunt, and his melancholy gray eyes were sunk in cavernous sockets above his prominent cheek bones. A girl schoolmate has described him: “His shoes, when he had any, were low. He wore buckskin breeches, linsey-woolsey shirt, and a cap made of the skin of a squirrel or coon. His breeches were baggy and lacked by several inches meeting the tops of his shoes, thereby exposing his shin-bone, sharp, blue and narrow.”