Page:Life and Works of Abraham Lincoln, v1.djvu/60

30 Lincoln's report of the new country, being roseate, probably more than facts warranted, induced some of his Kentucky neighbors to migrate thither; and accordingly Mrs. Lincoln's aunt and uncle, Betsy and Thomas Sparrow, arrived at the Lincoln place in November, 1817, bringing with them Dennis Hanks, who was a cousin-german to Nancy Hanks Lincoln, and, of course, a second cousin to the future President. This family camped in the recently deserted camp of the Lincolns, where they remained till they, too, could get up in the world as their kinsman had done.

For some time after the settlement in Indiana, there was no school in that primitive, sparsely settled neighborhood, but when Abraham was eleven years of age there was a school opened in a log shanty about one and a half miles distant from his home, by one Hazel Dorsey,—the term "Hazel," which formed a component part of the teacher's name, being supposed to refer to a species of twig whose use in the rude schoolroom was auxiliary to good scholarship. Andrew Crawford was Abraham's next teacher, his ministrations occurring in the winter of 1822–3, as nearly as can be defined. Finally one Swaney opened a school, pronounced by him skule, about five miles from the Lincoln home in 1826, which Lincoln attended for a very short time, and these three schools in Indiana, and two in Kentucky, comprise all that he ever attended; the total time consumed (as Lincoln told Swett) being about four months in all. And such schools! If erudition was ponderable, all that the entire five teachers knew could have been compassed in a thimble. The future President himself said: