As a hired boy, he plowed corn, chopped wood, and did all kinds
of chores. He did not like farming, but he managed to have fun.
"Pa taught me to work," Abe told one farmer who had hired him, "but he
never taught me to love it."
The farmer scratched his head. He couldn't understand a boy who was
always reading, and if Abe wasn't reading he was telling jokes. The
farmer thought that Abe was lazy.
"Sometimes," the farmer said, "I get awful mad at you, Abe Lincoln. You
crack your jokes and spin your yarns, if you want to, while the men are
eating their dinner. But don't you keep them from working."
The other farm hands liked to gather around Abe when they stopped to eat
their noon meal. Sometimes he would stand on a tree stump and
"speechify." The men would become so interested that they would be late
getting back to the fields. Other times he would tell them stories that
he had read in books or that he had heard from some traveler who had
passed through Pigeon Creek. He nearly always had a funny story to tell.
[Illustration]
Yet there was "something peculiarsome about Abe," as Dennis Hanks once
said.
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