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home, but there was young life to be taken into the account. The new sons-in-law of Mrs. Lincoln, as well as Abraham, were doubtless averse to repeating the severe experiences of the father, and with fresh life and enterprise desired a new and more inviting field of operations,

Mr. Lincoln sold out his squatter's claim in Indiana, and, on the first of March, 1830, less than a month after Abraham had completed his twenty-first year, he started for the land of promise in company with his family and the sons-in-law and two daughters of his wife. Their journey was difficult and tedious in the extreme. They found the rivers swollen by the spring rains, and through such mud as only the rich soil of the West can produce, the ox-teams dragged the wagons, loaded with the entire personal effects of the emigrants. One of these teams was driven by Abraham. Taking a northwesterly course, they struck diagonally across the southern part of Indiana, making toward the central portion of Illinois. After a journey of two hundred miles, which they made in fifteen days, they entered Macon County in that state, and there halted. The elder Lincoln selected a spot on the north side of the Sangamon River, at the junction of the timber land and prairie, about ten miles westerly of Decatur. Here, Abraham assisted his father in building a log cabin, and in getting the family into a condition for comfortable life. The cabin, which still stands, was made of hewed timber, and near it were built a smoke-house and stable. All the tools they had to work with were a common ax, a broad ax, a handand a "drawer knife." The doors and floor were made of puncheons and the gable ends of the structure boarded up with plank "rived" by Abraham's hand out of oak timber.? The nails used-and they were very few-were all brought from their old home in Indiana. When the cabin and outbuildings were completed, Abraham set to work and helped to split rails enough to fence in a lot of ten acres, and built the fence. After breaking up the piece of inclosed prairie, and seeing it planted with corn, he turned over the new home to his father, and announced his intention to seek or make his

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