money to pay for carpenter work. He had to hunt, and fish, and grow corn, and chop trees and burn stumps. He had no time to put a floor in his cabin. The land was too poor to grow much corn. When the boy was eight years old the father said they must move a hundred miles away to get a better farm.
The mother packed everything that was worth taking with them, on the backs of two horses. The family walked. The big cousin drove a cow. The father carried a gun and shot game for their supper. When they came to the Ohio River they made a big raft of logs for a flat-boat. Even the horses and the cow went on the raft. The men pushed it across with long poles. The water was too wide and deep for the horses to swim. Then they were in a new state called Indiana.
They built a pole shack in the woods. A pole shack was a shed, open on one side. It wasn't nearly as good as a wigwam. The fire was outside. They lived in the shack a year. The boy was only nine, when the mother died, just as they got a good cabin built. Little, tired, wildwood lady! That life was too hard for her.
The boy helped his father and cousin saw boards from a green log to make a coffin. He whittled pegs to fasten the boards together. They had no nails. They buried the mother under maple trees, near where the deer came down to drink. The boy never forgot how his mother died. As long as he lived his eyes were sad, his lips tender. He pitied and loved and helped everything weak and helpless.
That lonely winter he studied his spelling book. His mother had told him that his grandfather came from good people in Virginia. She taught him to read and write. She told him he must study. By and by, a good stepmother came. She had three children so it was not so lonely in the cabin. She had a wagon load of tables and beds and chairs and blankets and dishes. She had a spinning wheel and a loom. The. stepmother was a strong, kind, clever woman, who made everyone comfortable and happy. She found out that the boy loved books, and she helped him all she could.
He walked twenty miles to borrow a big law book. His cousin gave him a book of fables. He split cord wood to buy a little Life of Washington. He kept a book in the bosom of his checked shirt. At noon he sat under a tree and read a book, as he ate a dry, hard, corn dodger for his dinner. In the nearest village, he read a newspaper in a log store. When he grew up he knew more than any
