nished a brief autobiography to Mr. Hicks, an artist who was painting his portrait, in which he said,

"I was born February 12, 1809, in then Hardin County, Kentucky, at a point within the now County of Larue, a mile or a mile and a half from where Hodgen's mill now is. My parents being dead, and my own memory not serving, I know no means of identifying the precise locality. It was on Nolen Creek.

"June 14, 1860."

"A. LINCOLN.

The precise spot has since been clearly identified, and the cabin was still standing after his death.

In 1813 the family removed to a more comfortable home on Knob Creek, six miles from Hodgensville, where Thomas Lincoln bought a better farm of two hundred and thirty-eight acres for one hundred and eighteen pounds and gave his note in payment. This was Abraham Lincoln's second home, and there he lived for four years.

We know little about his childhood, except that it was of continual privation in a cheerless home, for Thomas Lincoln evidently found it difficult to supply his family with food and clothing. Mr. Lincoln seldom talked freely of those days, even to his most intimate friends, although from remarks which he dropped from time to time they judged that the impressions of his first years were indelible upon his temperament and contributed to his melancholy. On one occasion, being asked if he remembered anything about the War of 1812, he said that when a child, returning from fishing one day, he met a soldier in the road and, having been admonished by his mother that everybody should be good to the soldiers, he gave him his fish.

Thomas and Nancy Lincoln had three children. Sarah, the eldest, at the age of fourteen married Aaron

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Griggsby and died in childbirth a year later. Thomas, the third child, died when only three days old.

When Abraham was about seven years old his father became restless and went across the river into Indiana to look for a new home. It has been represented by some of Lincoln's biographers that the motive of his removal was his dislike of slavery; that he wished to remove his son from its influence; but Lincoln attributed the determination to other reasons, particularly his father's difficulty in securing a valid title to his land. It is quite as probable that, like other men of his temperament, he thought he could do better in a new place; like other rolling stones, that he could gather more moss in a new soil. He found a purchaser for his farm who gave him in payment twenty dollars in money and ten barrels of whiskey, which Thomas Lincoln loaded upon a flat-boat, with his household furniture, floating it down Knob Creek to Rolling Fork, to Salt River, to the Ohio River, and down the Ohio to Thompson's Ferry in Perry County, Indiana. The boat upset on the way and part of the whiskey and some of his carpenter tools were lost. He plunged into the forest, found a location that suited him about sixteen miles from the river, called Pigeon Creek, where he left his property with a settler, and, as his boat could not float upstream, he sold it and walked back to Hodgensville to get his wife and two children. He secured a wagon and two horses, in which he carried his family and whatever of his household effects were then remaining.

Arriving at his location, which was a piece of timber land a mile and a half east of what is now Gentryville, Spencer County, he built a log cabin fourteen feet square, open to the weather on one side, and without windows or chimney. This was Abraham Lincoln's third home, and the family lived in that rude, primitive way for more than a year, managing to raise a patch of corn and a few vegetables during the following summer, which,

with corn meal ground at a hand grist-mill seven miles away, were their chief food. Game, however, was abundant. The streams were full of fish and wild fruits could be gathered in the forest. The future President of the United States slept upon a heap of dry leaves in a narrow loft at one end of the cabin, to which he climbed by means of pegs driven into the wall. A year after his arrival Thomas Lincoln entered the quarter section of land he occupied and made his first payment under what was familiarly known as the "two-dollar-an-acre law," but it was eleven years before he could pay enough to obtain a patent for half of it. He then erected a permanent home of logs which was comparatively comfortable and was perhaps as good as those occupied by most of his neighbors.

In the fall of 1818 the little community of pioneers was almost exterminated by an epidemic known as " milk sickness," and among the victims was Nancy Hanks Lincoln, who was buried with her neighbors in a little clearing in the forest in a coffin made of green lumber, cut with a whip-saw by her husband. There were no ceremonies at her burial, but several months later Abraham, then ten years old, wrote to Parson David Elkin, the itinerant Free-will Baptist preacher at Hodgensville, of his mother's death, and begged him to come to Indiana and preach her funeral sermon. Nancy Lincoln must have been highly esteemed or this poor parson would not have come a hundred miles through the wilderness in answer to this summons from her child, for several months later he appeared according to appointment, and all the settlers for many miles around assembled to hear him. It was the most important event that had ever occurred in the community and was remembered longer than any other.

The death of Mrs. Lincoln left the child Sarah, then only eleven years old, to care for the household, and, with the assistance of her brother, she struggled through