trees he cut down in the woods around him. The cooking, such as it was, was done before the open fireplace, with the help of one tin oven "with a lid ;" one skillet, which also had a lid; a few tin dishes, and an earthen pot or so. But then hot coals could be raked out to broil steaks of venison or bearmeat; in the ashes potatoes could be roasted, or chestnuts; and in the season of green corn as many roasting-ears could be eaten as the children should choose to gather.

There was no hardship in all that part of frontier housekeeping, and little Abe did not feel the absence of knives and forks and table-cloths and a host of other luxuries which as yet he did not know by name. The earthen floor grew dry and hard and did not require any carpet. It would never fade or wear out. Truly it is wonderful how few are the things which cannot be dispensed with, and the red Indians, time out of mind, had managed very much after the manner of the white settlers who were now so steadily driving them out of their ancient hunting-grounds.

When the month of February came again, in the following winter, Abraham Lincoln was nine years old, and as tall as most boys of eleven or twelve. He could outrun any boy of his size among the old settlers or among the new families that were now coming in and scattering their cabins, here and there, through all the woods. He could handle an ax pretty well, and was a fair shot with a rifle, although that was the one backwoods art in which he never made himself perfect. He could hit a mark, living or otherwise, but there was no great accuracy in his marksmanship.

It was well for him and his sister that they were now old and strong enough to take some care of themselves, for they were very soon to have that to do. The spring of 1818 went by without anything especial to mark it, but trouble came with the heats of summer.

From that day to this, the scourge known among the people as "the milk-sick" has appeared locally, at longer or shorter

intervals, and its cause and nature are said to be almost as much a mystery now as they were then. Learned men have even declared that there is no such disease, and they may be right; but cattle die of it, and so do human beings, in their helpless ignorance. It came that summer, creeping around among the cabins of the settlers, and nobody knew where it came from or how to deal with it. There were no physicians to be had; and perhaps it was as well, since the strange disorder was to baffle science for half a century afterwards. Farms were stripped of their cattle, and men and women lay down to suffer tediously and waste away and die, and small help could be obtained in any form.

Among those who were taken that season were Thomas and Betsy Sparrow, and they and Dennis Hanks had to come over to the log-house to be cared for.

Then Mrs. Nancy Lincoln was taken, and the house became a sort of hospital, with Tom Lincoln to provide for it, and the children to do the cooking and the nursing.

Through the hot, still days of the remaining summer, and through September, the watching and the suffering went on in the lonely log-hut, and not in all that time was there a single visit there of any physician.

There was no possible thing to be done in that or any other cabin through all that region to make matters any easier for the sick or for the well. It was a necessary part of the frontier-life through which Abraham Lincoln was receiving his education and development. He and his sister and their father and little Dennis did what they could, but Tom was often called upon to leave his home for a while. He was the only man in the settlement who knew how to saw logs into rough planks and make them up into coffins, and there was need of a coffin every now and then.

Thomas and Betsy Sparrow died about the first of October, and they were both buried in a knoll in the woods about half a mile northeast of their cabin. On the 5th of October Mrs.

Nancy Lincoln died, and she too was buried on the knoll under the shadows of the forest. About a score of people attended the funeral, but there was no minister present to conduct the simple ceremonies. A few months later a traveling preacher named David Elkin preached a funeral sermon, but to this day there is no stone to mark the last resting-place of the body of Nancy Lincoln. The simple fact requires no word of comment or interpretation.

The log-house was now no longer a hospital; it was only a desolate and lonely place where Tom Lincoln and his two children and Dennis Hanks could stay and learn all the remaining lessons of utter poverty in the backwoods.

Abe was learning lessons very fast, and more shadows were gathering upon his boyish face.

The change in the manner of housekeeping or in the amount of it was not so great as it might have been in another home than that, and the children could get along after a fashion without any mother. Poor Nancy Lincoln had followed her shiftless husband into the woods, only to die of the mysterious pestilence and to be buried, and soon and altogether forgotten.

Utter Desolation-Arrival of a Good Angel-A Ray of Civilization-1819.

THERE are many things which cannot be done by a tenyear-old boy, a girl of twelve, and a middle-aged backwoodsman. There were no new clothes made that winter for Nancy Lincoln's motherless children, and Tom shifted for his own apparel as best he could.

The spring, the summer, and the autumn of the year 1819 went slowly by. The log-house grew more dirty and more desolate, and Abe and his sister and Dennis Hanks became more and more like a trio of unwashed, uncared-for, and halfnaked young savages. It did not seem so much of a hardship during the warmer weather, and there was only now and then a passer-by to make unkind remarks upon the condition of things; but the storms and frosts of winter were surely coming.

Even Tom Lincoln at last awoke to a consciousness that something must be done, and about the first of November the young folk had the cabin all to themselves. Whether or not they knew the nature of Tom's errand to Kentucky, they were left to do their own housekeeping.

There was corn enough and bacon, and some kinds of small fresh meat could be obtained from the woods by a fair degree of boyish industry. Wood was to be had for the chopping, and they need not freeze; and there were the cabins of neighbors to go to now in any dire extremity. Still the hunting of game over frozen ground, and the chopping of logs in the snow, was chilly work for barefooted boys; and the next four weeks

were hard ones, in the course of training through which little Abe was preparing for the unknown trials before him.

The weeks went by, and the snow fell, and the storms whistled through the woods and blew drearily in through the open door and windows of the cabin; but the children made the best of it.

There came an afternoon in December when a great shout reached their ears from the edge of the clearing. It was Tom Lincoln's voice, and the young housekeepers went out to see.

He had returned, and he had come with a team of four horses and a lumber-wagon laden with some kind of property. There had plainly been a miracle of some sort. It was very nearly one, for Tom had persuaded a respectable widow woman, Mrs. Sally Johnston, of Elizabethtown, Kentucky, to marry him and come to live in his Indiana "home." Her maiden name had been Bush, and before her first marriage Tom had admired her and proposed and been rejected. present suit had been more successful, and she had only waited so long in order to close up her affairs in Kentucky. The four-horse team was the property of Tom's brother-in-law, Ralph Krume, who had been hired to convey the bride and her household goods to their new abiding-place.

His

Their new mother was no stranger to Abe and his sister. She had even exhibited an especial liking for Abe in days gone by, and she had now been sent into the wilderness for his benefit as much as for that of his father.

She brought with her a son and two daughters of her own,John, Sarah, and Matilda,—and with them what to the eyes of her step-children was something like splendor. The wagon contained a fine bureau, a table, a set of chairs, a large clotheschest, cooking-utensils, knives, forks, bedding, and other articles, the like of which had never before been carried under any roof of Tom Lincoln's.

Mrs. Sally Johnston had been a woman of respectable family and much personal pride, and had been led to expect some