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The early home of Lincoln in Elizabethtown, Ky. From Raymond's "Life of Lincoln."

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mainder of his time he vegetated. In the fall of 1816, the spirit of change came over Thomas Lincoln once more. He had had some experience as a flat-boatman on two trips to New Orleans, and thought to move in that way. He used his skill in carpentry for the construction of a flat-boat, converted his personal property into four hundred gallons of whiskey, and started with his tools and his whiskey, alone. He was ship-wrecked on the raging Ohio but righted his boat, rescued most of his whiskey and a few of his tools, and floated down to Thompson's Ferry two and a half miles west of Troy, in Ferry County, Indiana. Sixteen miles distant from the river, he found a place that he regarded a promising location. Thence he started back on foot for his wife and children, and on borrowed horses he brought the few remaining effects of his family, their clothing and bedding and the small stock of kitchen utensils.

The Lincoln farm was situated between the forks of the Big and the Little Pigeon Creeks a mile and a half east of the little village of Gentryville, in a small wellwooded region, full of game. There he built a log cabin closed on three sides and open on the fourth. The house was about fourteen feet square and floorless. Into this comfortless cabin, with few of the ordinary arrangements for warmth or covering, exposed to all the winds that blow, for it was on a hillock and built of poles, he conducted his little family. The place was a solitude. No road approached it save the trail that Lincoln had blazed through the woods. For a whole year they en

dured the discomforts of this home in the woods, while some ground was being cleared and a little crop planted. Some relatives followed them from Kentucky the next year, and among

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Dennis Hanks.

sparsely peopling the waste places of the new state of Indiana. The nearest hand-mill to Thomas Lincoln was ten miles away, whither Abraham carried the grist. Of schooling there was little more than in Kentucky, and that of a very simple kind. For two years Thomas Lincoln went the even tenor of his way, raising a little corn, shooting a little game, failing to provide systematically or with any solicitude for the needs of his family. No furniture was in the house save the roughest-three-legged

stools for chairs, a log with legs on it for a table, bedsteads made of poles fastened at one end to the wall and resting on forked sticks, driven into the earthen floor at the other end. On these, boards were laid, while leaves and old clothing served for the bed. They ate from a few pewter dishes, without knives or forks. A dutch oven and a skillet, were the sole utensils of their cabin. A bed-room in the loft, to which he climbed on pins driven in the wall, was the nightly roost of the future president.

Now the milk sickness appeared, and Thomas Lincoln's carpentry was employed in building rough coffins for the dying settlers. He cut out the timber from logs with his whip-saw and made rough boxes for a number of his friends. Nancy Lincoln was stricken. There was not a physician within thirty miles, and no money to pay him should he come. Without a hand to relieve her, the poor jaded woman, the mother of the great president, dropped away on the 5th of October, 1818, and was buried without ceremony in an unmarked grave. She had given birth to a man-child on whom time should set the seal of greatness. His sole apparent inheritance from her, however, seems to have been the tinge of melancholy that often clouded his life. In his observations upon the making of his character he has little or nothing to say of his own mother. The early years of his life were years of neglect. He grew up in deprivation, ill-fed, illclothed, to develop alone in the sunshine and in the forest the nature that was in him.

But a new influence was soon imported into the Lincoln home. After thirteen months of widowhood,

Thomas Lincoln made a journey to Kentucky, and brought home with him a new wife, whom he had known and loved many years before as Sally Bush, a woman of "great energy and good sense, very neat and tidy in her person and manners, and who knew how to manage children." She brought with her from her Kentucky home a store of luxuries and comforts that the Indiana cabin had never known. It took a four-horse team to move her effects, and at once she demanded that the floorless, windowless and doorless cabin should be made habitable. Warm beds were for the first time provided for the children. She took off their rags and clothed them from her own stores; she washed them and treated them with motherly tenderness, and to use her own language, she made them look a little more human.

Her heart went out at once to young Abe and all was changed for him. She discovered possibilities in him and set about his training, gratified, loved and directed him, and won his heart. She was the mother whom he describes as his "saintly mother, his angel of a mother who first made him feel like a human being”—and took him out of the rut of degradation and neglect and shiftlessness that, if long continued, might have controlled his destiny. She insisted that he should be sent to school as soon as there was a school to go to; he had already acquired a little reading and writing and was quick in the acquisition of knowledge.

In the rude school house at Little Pigeon Creek where Hazel Dorsey presided, Abraham attended in the winter of 1819, and quickly became the best speller in the

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