More often, some one of the
settlers who was fortunate enough to possess the rudiments of an
education undertook the role of schoolmaster in the interval
between the autumn corn-gathering and the spring ploughing and
planting.
Instruction rarely extended beyond the three R's; but
occasionally a newcomer who had somewhere picked up a smattering
of algebra, Latin, or astronomy stirred the wonder, if not also
the suspicion, of the neighborhood. Schoolbooks were few and
costly; crude slates were made from pieces of shale; pencils were
fashioned from varicolored soapstone found in the beds of small
streams. No frontier picture is more familiar or more pleasing
than that of the farmer's boy sitting or lying on the floor
during the long winter evening industriously tracing by firelight
or by candlelight the proverb or quotation assigned him as an
exercise in penmanship, or wrestling with the intricacies of
least common denominators and highest common divisors. It is in
such a setting that we get our first glimpse of the greatest of
western Americans, Abraham Lincoln.
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