The Lincoln Story Book

to gain full man's wages, whether it was his father or he handled it, he felt the injustice, which soured him on that point. He enraged his employer's son by sitting up late to read, so that the young man struck him to silence. But the young giant refused from retaliating in kind, whether from natural magnanimity belonging to giants, or from respect for the "young master," or from self-acknowledgment that he was in the wrong. He learned the craft of river boatman in this engagement. One day, on being asked to kill a hog, he replied like the Irishman with the violin, "that he had never done it, but he would try."

"If you will risk the hog," he said, "I will risk myself!"

Becoming hog-slaughterer added this branch occupation to the many of "the man of all work." Taylor sub-let him out in this capacity for thirty cents a day, saying:

"Abe will do any one thing about as well as another."

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THE REST WAS VILE.

The Lincoln homestead in Indiana, in 1820-23, h