Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: WHEN Abraham Lincoln, after having been named for President, was questioned by a campaign biographer as to his early life, he very pathetically said the whole story might be told in a single line of Gray's "Elegy,"— " The short and simple annals of the poor." All the world has now learned that the man who spoke thus modestly of himself was born in the State of Kentucky on the twelfth day of February, 1809. His cradle, if he ever had one, stood upon the dirt floor of a rude log hut; above it was a clap-board roof; about it was that kind of superstition which an isolated people, full of rude elemental force, is apt to manifest, and that kind of poverty which, in a new and free country, casts no shadow of degradation, for it is not the absence of goods but the invidious and blighting contrast of conditions which constitutes real poverty. This boy, too, was surrounded by people who were profoundly ignorant of the world and of the ways of men, and almost as profoundly ignorant of all bookish learning. It is certain that the humblest child in the whole country might now, within the limits of a single year, have the benefit of a far better schooling than was accessible to Lincoln in the time covering all the years of his minority. His surroundingsfrom birth to manhood remained practically unchanged, and, although his roving father made in that time something more than the number of removes which Poor Richard deemed "equal to one fire," there is no evidence that in the first twenty -one years of his life Abraham Lincoln met with any personal example, or fell under any social influence, which would ordinarily be expected to quicken his mind, arouse his hope, or inspire his ambition. rise of one of the greatest statesmen of history from an environment apparently so luckless, naturally...