writing, and taught her husband to write his name. She was born to drudgery and her natural beauty soon gave place to the faded and woe-begone expression that poverty and struggle and uncertainty are wont to write on the faces and forms of the women of the frontier. The first home of her married life was a wretched hovel in one of the alleys of Elizabethtown, Kentucky, where her first child was born, and a little later she occupied with her husband the miserable cabin on Nolin Creek where, on account of his thriftlessness, he barely met the necessities of the little household.

It was here that Abraham Lincoln was born. The manger at Bethlehem was not a more unlikely birthplace. And here he remained until he was four years old, and then the elder Lincoln migrated to another farm some six miles from Hodgensville, on Knob Creek, whose clear waters flowed at length into the Ohio, twenty-four miles below Louisville. This new move that might have proved advantageous—for the banks of the creek and the valleys of the region gave great promise of fertility— was like Thomas Lincoln's other experiences; only six acres out of the two hundred and thirty-eight that made up the farm, were worked, and no permanent title to the land was acquired by him. After four years a new migration began, this time to Indiana.

During these years of Kentucky life young Lincoln's development went on with none of the modern aids. A few days of schooling each summer at the hands of Zachariah Riney and Caleb Hazel were all the opportunities that Kentucky offered him. During the re

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

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. 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

them, Dennis

Hanks, the young

cousin of Abraham

Lincoln.

In 1817 a new log house was reared by Thomas Lincoln of unhewed timbers and without floor, door or windows. Seven or eight older settlers had preceded them to this region and soon a tide of emigration poured in,

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,