poor and " grew up literally without education," a "wandering, laboring boy," as his famous son has recorded. He developed into a man of stalwart body, five feet ten inches in height, and was honest and sober. Ambition, however, seemed to be crushed in him by the hard circumstances of his youth and, drifting about from one job to another, he steadily sank in social condition. He was as often called "Linkern" or "Linkorn" as Lincoln, because he himself did not know how to spell his name.

Finally he became a carpenter and married Nancy Hanks, the niece of the man in whose shop he worked. The Hankses had come from Virginia in the same party with the Lincolns, and it had been Nancy's ill fortune to be set adrift, an orphan, much after the manner of her husband's lot in life. She was regarded as handsome in her girlhood, and one old neighbor declared long afterward, "The Hanks girls were great at camp-meetings. They were the finest singers and shouters in our county."

The union of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks was celebrated in the rollicking manner of the time and place. Bear meat, venison, wild turkey, and duck graced the feast. There was maple sugar, swung on a string to bite off for coffee or whiskey," there was syrup in big gourds, there were peaches and wild honey, and a sheep was cooked whole over,

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wood coals in a pit. When Thomas went to housekeeping he was not so poor as to be without a cow, and he had "a good feather bed, a loom and wheel." He took his bride to a little cabin in the village no larger than one room of an ordinary dwelling.

In spirit Nancy, who was twenty-three at her marriage, was much the superior of her twenty-eightyear-old husband, and she tried her best to teach him to read and write. His son frankly confessed, however, that his father "never did more in the way of writing than to bunglingly write his own

name."

With the birth of their first child, a daughter, the Lincolns were forced to the conclusion that a family could not be supported on what a carpenter could earn in a community where most men built their homes with their own hands, and they moved to a farm near the village. There, in a mere hut, on those poor, barren acres, Abraham Lincoln was born to Thomas and Nancy. His only cradle was his good mother's arms. His only playmate in his earliest childhood was his sister. His playground was the lonely forest. He had no toys, for toys cost money, and money was hardly ever seen in the Lincoln home.

The father must raise or shoot what they ate; and the mother's restless fingers must spin and

weave what they wore. Free schools were then unknown in Kentucky; but his mother, poor as she was, insisted on sending Abraham and his sister to a teacher. He could fish in the Big South Fork, and once, as he was coming from the creek, the patriotic spirit aroused in his home by the War of 1812, then in progress, was put to the test. "I had been fishing one day," he said years afterward, "and caught a little fish, which I was taking home. I met a soldier in the road and, having been told that we must be good to the soldiers, I gave him my fish."

After a few years of struggling, Thomas Lincoln began to long for the newer country to the west. The deed to his place was in dispute and he could not afford to buy another farm, because Kentucky was rapidly becoming a settled state and its good land was valuable. Moreover, the people with profitable farms were slaveholders. There were very few slaves in the Lincoln neighborhood, it is true; the soil was not rich enough for such careless labor. Still, Abraham Lincoln has said that his father's "removal was partly on account of slavery, but chiefly on account of the difficulty in land titles."

The claim to the farm was sold for 400 gallons of whiskey and $20 in money, the whole amounting