Thus he read and reread, AEsop's Fables,
learning to tell stories with a point and to argue by parables; he read
Robinson Crusoe, The Pilgrim's Progress, a short history of the United
States, and Weems's Life of Washington. To the town constable's he went
to read the Revised Statutes of Indiana. Every printed page that fell
into his hands he would greedily devour, and his family and friends
watched him with wonder, as the uncouth boy, after his daily work,
crouched in a corner of the log cabin or outside under a tree, absorbed
in a book while munching his supper of corn bread. In this manner he
began to gather some knowledge, and sometimes he would astonish the girls
with such startling remarks as that the earth was moving around the sun,
and not the sun around the earth, and they marvelled where "Abe" could
have got such queer notions. Soon he also felt the impulse to write; not
only making extracts from books he wished to remember, but also composing
little essays of his own. First he sketched these with charcoal on a
wooden shovel scraped white with a drawing-knife, or on basswood
shingles.
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