From the book “The New Joy of Words” page 86, Abe tells of his life on the frontier.
My question comes from this wrighting.
[COLOR=SeaGreen][COLOR=SlateGray]"I was born February 12, 1809, in Hardin county, Kentucky. My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguised families-second families, perhaps I should say. My mother, who died in my tenth year, was of a family of the name of Hanks…My paternal grandfather, Abraham Lincoln, emigrated from Rockingham county, Virginia, to Kentucky about 1781 or 1782, where, a year or two later, he was killed by the Indians, not in battle, but by stealth, when he was laboring to open a farm in the forest.
"My father (Thomas Lincoln) at the death of his father was but six years of age. By the early death of his father, and the very narrow circumstancees of his mother, he was, even in childhood, a wandering, laboring boy, and grew up literally without education. He never did more in the way of writing than bunglingly to write his own name… He removed from Kentucky to what is now Spencer county, Indiana, in my eighth year… It was a wild region, with many bears and other animals still in the woods… There were some schools, so-called, but no qualification was ever required of a teacher beyond ‘readin’, writin’, and cipherin, to the rule of three.’ If a straggler supposed to understand Latin happened to sojourn in the neighborhood he was looked upon as a wizard… Of course, when I came of age I did not know much. Still, somehow, I could read, write, and cipher to the rule of three. But that was all… The little advance I now have upon this store of education I have picked up from time to time under the pressure of necessity.
-A. LINCOLN.
My Question;
What is cipherin to the rule of three?