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eating raw potatoes at the Lincolns'; it was not always easy to build a fire before the days of matches. Abraham Lincoln long afterward said with simple sadness in speaking of this period of his life, "They were pretty pinching times."

Malaria lurked in the deep glades of the forest, and pestilence was bred by the ignorant habits of the people. A large part of the population was stricken by a disease known to the backwoods as milk sickness. The wife of Thomas Lincoln, crushed in spirit by the hard fortunes of the family through two winters, and bent in body under the burdens of a frontier household, fell an easy prey to this epidemic.

There was no physician within thirty-five miles, and the swift fever burned her life out while her helpless husband and children watched by her bed. As the end drew near, Abraham knelt sobbing beside his dying mother, while she laid her hand on his young head and gave him her last message, telling him to be good to his father and sister, and calling on all to be good to one another, to love their kin, and to worship God.

When the wearied soul was gone, the broken body was shrived by the Lincolns and the Hankses, there in the isolation of their forest home. Thomas himself felled the pine tree and cut out the green

boards, which he pegged together for the rude coffin. In a shallow grave on a knoll near by, without a spoken prayer, but bitterly wept by children and kindred, all that could die of Nancy Hanks Lincoln was tenderly lowered to that rest which was denied her in life. As long as he lived, her son held her in reverence as his "angel mother," and there is a tradition that sometime after her burial, the sorrowing boy induced a traveling preacher to deliver a sermon and say a prayer above her grave.

With this death, that which made a home of the bare hut, a wife's devotion and a mother's love, was gone, and the widower and the orphaned were left in desolation to face a hard and dreary winter. After a short time of despair, the father rose to the practical necessity of his situation and went back to Kentucky to seek out a new head for his house and a mother for his family.

On this mission, he made a wise choice. Finding that one whom he had known in his youth was widowed, he courted her with such despatch that they were married the next morning.

When Thomas returned to Little Pigeon Creek with his tall, curly-haired bride and her son and two daughters, a four-horse team was needed to carry her property, for she was rich in comparison

with her groom. The forlorn, neglected little boy, Abraham, who was growing up like a weed, looked with wondering eyes as he helped unload the fine things. A bureau, that must have cost $50, was among them. There was an extra feather bed to take the place of his pallet in the loft, and at last he was to have a pillow for his head. There were also homespun blankets and quilts, a flax wheel, and a soap kettle.

The new mistress ordered a wash-stand to be set up beside the doorway, and she scrubbed the children and fitted them out with decent clothing. She gave Abraham a linsey-woolsey shirt of her own make to take the place of his old deerskin shirt. Her husband was driven to make and hang a door, lay a floor, cut a window, and to grease some paper with which to cover it and let in the light.

Abraham had so far forgotten the little he had learned in the Kentucky school that now, though ten years old, he could not write. Yet somehow he had become the leader of the household. Without schools or books, his only chance to learn was from wayfarers, and on such occasions he showed a thirst for knowledge which annoyed his father, who could not sympathize with the inquiring mind of his boy. As he sat perched on the fence in front of the cabin, he would ask questions as long as any

passer-by would tarry to answer him, or until his father sent him away.

One day a wagon broke down in the road, and the wife and two daughters of the owner stayed at the Lincolns' until it was repaired. "The woman had books," as Abraham recalled in later life, “and read us stories. They were the first I ever heard." There never had been a book or a newspaper in the house, and he never forgot the sight of those pages nor the woman who, by the chance of a breakdown on the road, opened to his mind the field of printed knowledge.

Hope and happiness entered the little cabin in the wilderness at the call of its thrifty and vigorous housewife, crowded though it was, for with the husband and wife, their five children, and two Hankses who had come to live with them, a family of nine dwelt in peace in its one room. There seemed to be a special harmony between Mrs. Lincoln and Abraham. "His mind," she said, "and mine- what little I had seemed to run together." She shared her heart with her husband's children and sanctified the name of stepmother.

[graphic]

THE CREEK NEAR LINCOLN'S BIRTHPLACE In this stream the boy Lincoln fished and swam

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