Abraham was accustomed to preach to the young members of his family. He would do the preaching, and his sister the weeping; and he sometimes became so much affected by his own discourses that he would weep with her, and they would have a very "moving service," as such a scene was called.
The boy swung the turtle over his head again, and at last let go of it in the air, so as to project it toward Abraham.
The poor reptile fell crushed at the foot of the stump and writhed in pain.
Abraham ceased to speak. He looked down on the pitiful sight of suffering, and his heart yearned over the helpless creature, and then his brain became fired, and his eyes flashed with rage.
"Who did that?" he exclaimed. "Brute! coward! wretch!" He looked down again, and saw the reptile trying to move away with its broken shell. His anger turned to pity. He began to expostulate against all such heartlessness to the animal world as the scene exhibited before him. The poor turtle again tried to move away, his head just protruding, looking for some way out of the world that would deny him his right to the sunshine and the streams. The young orator saw it all; his lip curled bitterly, and his words burned. He awakened such a sympathy for the reptile, and such a feeling of resentment against the hand which had ruined this little life, that the offender shrank away from the scene, calling out defiantly:
"Come away, and let him talk. He's only chicken-hearted."
The scholars knew that there was no cowardice in the heart of Lincoln. They felt the force of the scene. The boys and girls of Andrew Crawford's school never forgot the pleas that Abraham used to make for the animals and reptiles of the woods and streams.
Nearly every youth exhibits his leading trait or characteristic in his school-days.
"The tenor of our whole lives," said an English poet, "is what we make it in the first five years after we become our masters"; and a wiser than he has said, "The thing that has been is, and God requireth the past." Columbus on the quays of Genoa; Zinzendorf forming among his little companions the order of the "Grain of Mustard-Seed"; the poets who "lisped in numbers"; the boy statesmanship of Cromwell; and the early aspiration of nearly every great leader of mankind--all showed the current of the life-stream, and it is the current alone that knows and prophesies the future. When Abraham Lincoln fell, the world uncovered its head. Thrones were sorrowful, and humanity wept. Yet his earliest rostrum was a stump, and his cause the natural rights of the voiceless inhabitants of the woods and streams. The heart that throbbed for humanity, and that won the heart of the world, found its first utterance in defense of the principles of the birds'-nest commandment. It was a beginning of self-education worthy of the thought of a Pestalozzi. It was a prophecy.