He attended spelling matches, log-rollings and horse races. He wrote vulgar and sometimes silly verse. He outraged the farmers who employed him by delivering comic addresses and buffoonery in the form of sermons from tree-stumps, to the snickering field hands. Sometimes he thrashed a bully. His strength was tremendous. No man in the country could withstand him. It is said that he once lifted half a ton. Yet his temper was cool, his heart gentle and generous, and back of his singsongy, rollicking, spraddling youth, with its swinging axe-blows, forest-prowlings, and coarse humor, there was a gravity, dignity, sanity, fairness, generosity and deep, straightout eloquence that made him a power in that small community. Think of a young man of six feet and four inches in coonskin and deerhide, who could sink an axe deeper into a tree than any pioneer in that heroic region, and who yet had perseverance enough in his cabin home to read “The Revised Statutes of Indiana” until he could almost repeat them by heart! He became a leader and could gather an audience by merely mounting a stump and waving his hands. Nor was that all. He frequently stopped brawls and acted as umpire between disputants. Another side of his nature was displayed when he found the neighborhood drunkard freezing by the roadside, carried him in his arms to the tavern and worked over him for hours. When Lincoln’s sister Sarah married Aaron Grigsby in 1826, the seventeen-year-old giant composed a song and sang it at the wedding. Here are the concluding verses: _The woman was not taken From Adam’s feet we see, So he must not abuse her, The meaning seems to be._ _The woman was not taken From Adam’s head we know, To show she must not rule him-- ’Tis evidently so._ _The woman she was taken From under Adam’s arm, So she must be protected From injuries and harm._ Yet that dry volume of “The Revised Statutes of Indiana,” through which the woodchopper worked so bravely, contained the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States and the Ordinance of 1787, and he bound them on his heart like a seal and wore them till the hour of his cruel death. As time went on Lincoln developed into a popular story-teller and oracle at Jones’ grocery store in the nearby village of Gentryville. His oratory grew at the expense of his farm-work. He went to all the trials in the local courts, and trudged fifteen miles to Booneville for the sake of hearing a lawsuit tried. Between times he wrote an essay on the American Government and another on temperance. He made speeches, he gossiped, he argued public questions, he cracked jokes, he made everybody his friend--sometimes he worked. Already he was an American politician, although he did not know it. [Illustration: Taken from an old print Lincoln debating with Douglas in 1858]