Nevertheless, it is worthy of special note
that even under such difficulties and limitations, the American thirst
for education planted a school-house on the very forefront of every
settlement.
Abraham's second school in Indiana was held about the time he was
fourteen years old, and the third in his seventeenth year. By this time
he probably had better teachers and increased facilities, though with
the disadvantage of having to walk four or five miles to the
school-house. He learned to write, and was provided with pen, ink, and a
copy-book, and probably a very limited supply of writing-paper, for
facsimiles have been printed of several scraps and fragments upon which
he had carefully copied tables, rules, and sums from his arithmetic,
such as those of long measure, land measure, and dry measure, and
examples in multiplication and compound division. All this indicates
that he pursued his studies with a very unusual purpose and
determination, not only to understand them at the moment, but to imprint
them indelibly upon his memory, and even to regain them in visible form
for reference when the school-book might no longer be in his hands or
possession.
Mr. Lincoln has himself written that these three different schools were
"kept successively by Andrew Crawford, ---- Swaney, and Azel W.
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