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and open on the fourth. It was about fourteen feet square, and its floor was the bare earth. It would have answered well enough for a party of hardy hunters, but it was a poor place for Nancy Lincoln and her little girl and boy to pass a Winter in. The season was not exceptionally severe, and Thomas. had a patch of his new farm cleared before Spring He was ready to plant some corn and vegetables, and when that was done he turned his attention once more to house building. He was in no hurry about it, for the pole shelter was not so bad a camp in Summer weather. The new shelter was about forty yards distant from the old. It was a one-room cabin, built of unhewn logs. There was a place for a door and another for a window, just as there was for a floor, but neither the one nor the other was put in. The holes in the wall and the pounded earth satisfied Thomas Lincoln's moderate ambition for a while. He constructed a bedstead of small posts driven into the earth, with cross-pieces. He made a table and some seats. There was a mud chimney and a fireplace. The loft above could be reached by climbing, for he had driven pegs into the logs for that purpose, so that Abe or Nancy or both could sleep up there. It was a vast improvement upon the pole shelter, and the Lincoln family took possession of it in the Autumn of the year 1817. They were landholders, farmers, living in their own house. They had already raised one crop, such as it was, and it looked as if more were sure to come. They had made an important advance in life.

CHAPTER II.

The Sparrow Family-Sickness and Death of Mrs. Lincoln-How a New Life Began-Schooldays and Schoolmasters in the Backwoods.

MRS. LINCOLN's Aunt Betsy married Thomas Sparrow. They had no children of their own, and so had adopted their nephew, Dennis Hanks. Nancy's own home had at one time been with them, and they had been her near neighbors in Kentucky after her marriage to Thomas Lincoln. They had not prospered, and in the fall of the year 1817 they accepted an invitation to join their relatives in the new undertaking in Indiana. They arrived just after the pole shelter was left vacant, and they at once took possession of it. The older members of both families were doubtless help and company for each other, but all that they gained was as nothing to what came to little Abe and his sister Nancy in having Dennis Hanks with them in all the fun the woods afforded. He was, moreover, just

the boy to make the most of whatever fun-making material there might be. Before his coming there had been no playmates, for the half dozen or more of cabins scattered at long intervals up and down the Big and Little Pigeon creeks were all too far away.

Indiana Territory was admitted into the Union as

a sovereign State in the year 1816, and a tide of immigration was setting in. One great result of the War of 1812 had been to settle the Indian question, so far as all that region was concerned, and the frontiersmen were no longer in any fear of savage forays. Their cabins became secure when Tecumseh fell at the battle of the Thames. The wild tribes were still powerful, but their war spirit was broken. They were not to again undertake widely extended hostilities until after yet another State should have time to form west of Indiana; until after another great chief should arise resembling Tecumseh, and until the little barefoot boy at play in the woods near Little Pigeon Creek should be old enough to command a company of riflemen.

On October 15th, 1817, Thomas Lincoln, under the credit system then existing, made a formal entry of his claim to the quarter section, one hundred and sixty acres, of government land upon which he had settled. About ten years later, June 6th, 1827, he relinquished to the Government his claim to one half of the land, completed his payment upon the other half, and received an actual patent for eighty acres around his house. During all the intervening time occupation free of rent or other molestation had been entirely secure.

The first half of the year following the arrival of the Sparrow family passed quietly. More trees came down, another crop was raised, and there was something like rude comfort and plenty in the two cabins. For Thomas and Nancy Lincoln it was a decided improvement over anything they had known.

in Kentucky since their wedding day. With the midsummer heats, however, a great darkness began to cloud over the scattered settlements of Southern Indiana. The strange disorder known in the Western country as the “milk sick" swept through as an epidemic scourge. Whatever may have been its nature, malarial or otherwise, its effects were equally destructive upon cattle and human beings. Suffering and death came to almost every cabin. It was a lingering fever, assailing the stomach so directly as to give rise to peculiar theories as to its origin in some sort of mineral poison finding its way into water, grasses, and milk.

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Thomas and Betsy Sparrow came down with the milk sick," and then Mrs. Lincoln was taken. The former were removed from the pole shelter to the cabin for better care, but there was little enough that could be done. The nearest physician was twenty miles away, and could not be reached, and all the frontier doctors had confessed that this mysterious pestilence baffled them. There were long weeks of watching, as the sufferers grew slowly weaker. The end came with the first week of October. Thomas and Betsy Sparrow died first, and then, on the 5th, Mrs. Lincoln.

Rude coffins were constructed by Thomas Lincoln out of boards which he had whip-sawed all alone from the trees he had felled. Graves were dug for each in succession upon a knoll about half a mile southeast of the house. The dead were buried with such help as could be had, and some months later a funeral sermon was preached by an itinerant preacher

named David Elkin. Little Abraham is said to have been instrumental in obtaining this last tribute of respect for the memory of his mother. No stone marked the spot for many long years, but one was erected in 1879. It bears the inscription :

NANCY HANKS LINCOLN,

MOTHER OF

PRESIDENT LINCOLN.

DIED OCTOBER 5, 1818. AGED 35 YEARS.

Erected by a Friend of her Martyred Son, 1879.

The grave is surrounded by a neat iron fence.

The Winter of 1818-19 was a lonely and dreary time in the Lincoln cabin. Whenever their father was absent on any protracted errand, of business or of work or of the hunting upon which so large a part of their supplies depended, the children and Dennis Hanks were left to take care of themselves. Perhaps the sad look in the boy's face deepened somewhat through those chilling, gloomy, uncarédfor days and months. It was not quite so bad after warm weather came again, so that shoeless children could ramble through the woods without getting frostbitten. Spring and Summer passed, and Thomas Lincoln himself began to dread more and more another Winter in a wifeless home. Years and years ago, before his courtship of Nancy Hanks, he had proposed matrimony to Sally Bush, of Elizabethtown, Ky., and had been rejected. She was a

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