LINCOLN

     "After finishing Blackstone [Blackstone's Commentaries on Law], he set out across the prairies for Springfield, twenty miles away, to borrow other law-books from an attorney he had met in the Black Hawk War.  On his way home he carried an open book in one hand, studying as he walked.  When he struck a knotty passage, he shuffled to a standstill, and concentrated on it until he had mastered the sense.
     He kept on studying, until he had conquered twenty or thirty pages, kept on until dusk fell and he could no longer see to read...The stars came out, he was hungry, he hastened his pace.
     He pored over his books now incessantly, having heart for little else.  By day he lay on his back, reading in the shade of an elm that grew beside the store, his bare feet angling up against the trunk of the tree.   By night he read in the cooper's shop, kindling a light from the waste material lying about.  Frequently he read aloud to himself, now and then closing the book and writing down the sense of what he had just read, revising, rephrasing it until it became clear enough for a child to comprehend."

~ Lincoln The Unknown, Dale Carnegie, 1937.