hawk, even then a middle-aged warrior of high renown, and little Abe was to know many valuable things hereafter with the help of that particular Indian. He was, in a manner, to go to a school of his keeping, and learn in it great practical lessons for the benefit of his country.

Abe knew nothing of Blackhawk then, however, and his deepest interest for the moment was centred upon the flat-bottomed ferry-boat which was to convey them across the swift and muddy water of the Ohio. It bore a remarkable likeness to the hapless craft his father had launched at the mouth of Knob Creek. The passage was made in safety, nevertheless, and so was the rest of the march to the Posey homestead; and here the Lincoln family passed their first night in the Territory of Indiana.

The next morning a lumber-wagon was obtained, and laden with the packs from the two horses and the poor relics of the cargo of Tom's flatboat. To these were added a few sacks of corn, and then all would have been very well if there had been any road before them by which to travel.

"I've been thar," said Tom. "I kin find the spot, and the trail's been blazed pretty much all the way."

True enough; but when he made his choice of a location he had been unincumbered, except by the rifle on his shoulder and the axe with which he "blazed" the trees to mark his path. Now he had a team and a loaded wagon behind him, and these required a wider path than that by which a hunter's feet might pass. There was no help for it, and a road had to be cut by good hard ax-work wherever the trees stood too closely together for the wagon to squeeze between. The distance was but sixteen miles in a straight line, but it was much more by the winding road Tom Lincoln made. By the time he reached the land he was to settle on, he may be said to have fairly earned it. He did reach it; and the autumn of Abraham Lincoln's seventh year found him a very new settler in one of the very newest of all new countries.

CHAPTER III.

CHILD-LIFE IN THE WILDERNESS.

Pole-shelter-Log Cabin and Clearing-Pestilence and Suffering-A Forest Funeral-1818.

A GRASSY hillock in the middle of a primeval forest is a very pretty thing to look upon. It will serve well, too, as a place for a temporary camp, in the perfect weather of an American autumn. Storms are sure to come, however, and storms bring rain, and the winter follows the autumn.

"Nancy," said Tom, "we can't stop to put up a house jest now; thar ain't time. We'll hev to start with a pole-shelter." "That'll do first rate; but I do wish we was nigher to a spring. That thar water-hole looks as if it mought go clean dry in summer," remarked his wife.

"Reckon not.

Leastwise it'll do till summer comes. We don't call for much water, no how."

There was some truth in that; but in after-time Tom was to spend many a weary day's work sinking unproductive holes in that neighborhood in a vain search for a well. He had done better if he had camped nearer a spring in the first place.

As he said, the building of a log-house was no small affair, while a large-sized "hunter's camp" could be put up in a hurry. Four fork-tipped uprights at the corners, those in the rear a little the longer, with strong "poles," or trunks of young trees, laid upon them, answered for the frame. Against these an abundance of other "poles" could be leaned and fastened, and the roof could be put on in corresponding style, with slabs of bark to shed the rain until shingles could be cut. For housekeeping purposes a fireplace and chimney of tempered

clay and sticks was all any settler expected; and cracks between the poles could also be "chinked" with mud, whether they were perpendicular or horizontal. The earth inclosed was pounded hard to make a floor of it. The household goods were brought in and scattered around the humble dwelling, and little Abe's first home in Indiana was as comfortable as it would ever be. There are many patterns of "pole-shelters," but Tom Lincoln was not the man to waste upon his own any labor not absolutely and immediately demanded by stern necessity.

Thus much having been provided against wind and rain, there was "clearing" to be done before there would be any farm, and Tom took to his ax. The woods around the cabin rang with the strokes of his chopping through what was left of the autumn and all through the winter, except when he was hunting the game required to keep his family from starving, or was absent on some errand to the shore of the Ohio.

There was plenty of fun for little Abe, and with it no small amount of work for him and his mother and sister, as the clearing went on. There were quantities of brushwood, and the like, to be heaped upon the fallen tree-trunks and set on fire. There were rabbits and even wild turkeys to be trapped and brought home in triumph, and the supply of woodchucks was all any boy could ask for. Then, too, he could sometimes go out with his father for deer by day, and by night for the plentiful harvest of raccoons. The latter were not "game," but their skins had a sure market, and were as good as money in payment for anything that was to be bought at the "store" by the river, sixteen miles away.

The winters of Southern Indiana are rarely severe. Old settlers say now that the climate was much milder in the old days, before the forests were cleared away. The "half-faced camp," as people used to call the kind of shelter Tom Lincoln had made, so long as it remained open on one side, answered its purpose very well. It was as good a place to live in, during

most weather, as the old cabin on Knob Creek or the older one on Rock Spring Farm. There was "settler's comfort" to be had even when it rained, in watching the leaks in the roof, to know just where to put on another slab of bark or basswood shingle when the weather should clear.

Before spring came again there was enough of land around the cabin, chopped clear of trees, to admit the planting of a patch of corn and potatoes between the stumps. There was no use in spending hard work on any kind of fence for that many-sided field. The deer would have jumped over it, if made; the 'coons and squirrels would have climbed it; and the few pigs Tom had been able to gather preferred to hunt a better living in the woods.

Except for the company of his sister, little Abe's first year in the wilderness was a lonely one. There was no neighbor for miles and miles. In one direction lay Big Pigeon Creek, and in another Little Pigeon Creek, afterwards called "Prairie Fork." Abe knew there were other settlements off there somewhere, and other boys and girls; but all of them had their own woodchucks to dig out, and none came near enough to help him with his. Even berry-picking, in the season of it, was a solitary and monotonous business, unless a bear chose to show himself among the bushes, or a gang of deer came out through the trees to be looked at.

Abe's legs grew longer and longer that year, just from having to travel so far for everything; and all the while the gloom and silence and awe of the great, solemn forest was settling upon his childish heart, and teaching him deep lessons, too deep for him then to understand. He had no other teachers that year.

As soon as hoeing time was over and the growing crops could be left to take care of themselves, there was a great work on hand. Nothing less than the building of a solid, fullgrown, heavy-log house.

Tom Lincoln's natural aversion to needless work forbade

him doing more for his logs than to cut them to right lengths and notch them for placing, before, with such help as he could get, they were rolled and hoisted into their places. They wore all their bark after they were in the walls, and that was no more than was customary. Then, too, the holes left for the window-sashes, which might some day be put in, were just as well without for the present, in Tom's opinion. Light and air would enter the cabin through them unhindered. So they would through the open doorway, in which no door was made to swing. The earth on which the house was built, when pounded hard, would once more, as in the pole-shelter, answer all the known purposes of a floor, so long as no pigs should be permitted to tear it up with their noses.

The log-house was a great improvement on the "camp," and it was hardly ready to move into before there were new-comers ready to occupy the hovel the Lincoln family moved out of.

Indiana had now become a State, with a population of about 65,000, and a great tide of immigration was beginning to pour in. On the very first wave of it, in the autumn of the year 1817, came relatives of the Lincolns, for Mrs. Betsy Sparrow was an aunt of Tom's wife, Nancy, and had cared for her in her childhood. With her came her husband, Thomas Sparrow, and a nephew of hers, the same little Dennis Hanks who had been Abe's playmate on Knob Creek.

The Lincoln settlement was sadly in need of neighbors, and the new settlers were welcomed. The Sparrows made their nest in the deserted pole-shelter, and now Abe and his sister had somebody to keep them company in the woods, and another house near enough to go to. Dennis was as fond of all manner of fun as was Abe himself, but there was no other resemblance between them.

The Sparrows were every shade as poor as the Lincolns; and as for the latter, it is matter of record that their new log-house contained neither chair, nor table, nor bedstead, other than such rough affairs as could be made by Tom himself from the