His wit might be mischievous, but it was never
malicious, and his nonsense was never intended to wound or to
hurt the feelings. It is told of him that he added to his fund of
jokes and stories humorous imitations of the sermons of eccentric
preachers.
Very likely too much is made of all these boyish pranks. He grew
up very like his fellows. In only one particular did he differ
greatly from the frontier boys around him. He never took any
pleasure in hunting. Almost every youth of the backwoods early
became an excellent shot and a confirmed sportsman. The woods
still swarmed with game, and every cabin depended largely upon
this for its supply of food. But to his strength was added a
gentleness which made him shrink from killing or inflicting pain,
and the time the other boys gave to lying in ambush, he preferred
to spend in reading or in efforts at improving his mind.
Only twice during his life in Indiana was the routine of his
employment changed. When he was about sixteen years old he worked
for a time for a man who lived at the mouth of Anderson's Creek,
and here part of his duty was to manage a ferry-boat which
carried passengers across the Ohio River. It was very likely this
experience which, three years later, brought him another. Mr.
Gentry, the chief man of the village of Gentryville that had
grown up a mile or so from his father's cabin, loaded a flatboat
on the Ohio River with the produce his store had collected--corn,
flour, pork, bacon, and other miscellaneous provisions--and
putting it in charge of his son Allen Gentry and of Abraham
Lincoln, sent them with it down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers,
to sell its cargo at the plantations of the lower Mississippi,
where sugar and cotton were the principal crops, and where other
food supplies were needed to feed the slaves.
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