As he had no money to pay for the injured book, he offered to work out the value of it.
Crawford fixed the price at three days' work, and the future President pulled corn for three days, thus becoming owner of the coveted volume." In addition to this, he was fortunate enough to get hold of AEsop's Fables, Pilgrim's Progress, and the lives of Benjamin Franklin and Henry Clay.

He made these books his own by conning them over and over, copying the more impressive portions until they were firmly fixed in his memory.
Commenting upon the value of this sort of mental training, Dr.Holland wisely remarks: "Those who have witnessed the dissipating effect of many books upon the minds of modern children do not find it hard to believe that Abraham Lincoln's poverty of books was the wealth of his life.

The few he had did much to perfect the teaching which his mother had begun, and to form a character which for quaint simplicity, earnestness, truthfulness, and purity, has never been surpassed among the historic personages of the world." It may well have been that Lincoln's lack of books and the means of learning threw him upon his own resources and led him into those modes of thought, of quaint and apt and logical reasoning, so peculiar to him.

At any rate, it is certain that books can no more make a character like Lincoln than they can make a poet like Shakespeare.
"By books may Learning sometimes befall, But Wisdom never by books at all,"-- a saying peculiarly true of a man such as Lincoln.
A testimonial to the influence of this early reading upon his childish mind was given by Lincoln himself many years afterwards.

While on his way to Washington to assume the duties of the Presidency he passed through Trenton, New Jersey, and in a speech made in the Senate Chamber at that place he said: "May I be pardoned if, upon this occasion, I mention that away back in my childhood, in the earliest days of my being able to read, I got hold of a small book--such a one as few of the younger members have seen, Weems's Life of Washington.