Abraham Lincoln's own sister Sarah married one Aaron Grigsby, a man in
the settlers' line of life; and Abraham, a youth under age, composed an
epithalamium on the occasion. The title was "Adam and Eve's
Wedding-Song," and the principal verses are given to show what
roughness pervaded the home on the frontier:
The woman was not taken from Adam's feet, we see,
So we must not abuse her, the meaning seems to be.
The woman was not taken from Adam's head, we know;
To show she must not rule him--'tis evidently so.
The woman, she was taken from under Adam's arm,
So she must be protected from injuries and harm.
* * * * *
"RISK THE HOGS AND I WILL RISK MYSELF!"
At the age of seventeen, Lincoln, the strongest and "longest" younker
of the neighborhood, was let out by his father for six dollars a month
and board to a James Taylor, ferryman of Anderson's Creek and the Ohio
River. He was also expected to do the farmwork and other jobs, as well
as the chores in and about the house. This included tending to the
baby--the good wives uniting to pronounce Abe the best of helps as "so
handy," as Mrs. Toodles would say.
He had attained his fixed height, exactly six feet three inches. (This
is his own record.) He really did, with his unusual strength, more than
any man's stint, and failing 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."
* * * * *