to $300. In those days, when there was no government tax on alcoholic spirits, any farmer was free to set up a still and make his corn into whiskey. There was indeed little else to do with corn, for there were no railroads to carry it to market, and it seldom sold for more than ten cents a bushel. When made into whiskey, however, it was easily traded. It was almost as good as money, which was extremely

scarce.

After Thomas had built a raft, he loaded the whiskey and his kit of tools on it. Leaving the family behind, he floated down the creek to the Ohio River and then across to the Indiana shore, where he chose some timber land for his new farm.

On his return to Kentucky, the family made ready to go with him to their Indiana home. The last sad duty of the mother was to take Abraham and his sister to the burial place of her third child, and there drop her tears upon the sod before leaving forever the little grave in its unmarked desolation.

LIFE IN THE INDIANA WILDERNESS

Removal of the Lincolns to a farm near Gentryville, Spencer County, Indiana, in the almost savage wilds of a new state, in 1816. - Their home, amid a primitive people, a mere hut, with no floor but the bare earth. — Abraham sleeping on a bed of leaves in the loft and growing up without education. - Wielding the axe in the primeval forest.— His one shot. - Death of his mother, October 5, 1818.-A desolate cabin. - Marriage of Thomas Lincoln and Sarah Bush Johnston at Elizabethtown, Kentucky, December 2, 1819. The new mother transformed the rude home. - A family of nine living in one room.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN was only seven years old when, his sister beside him, he trudged behind his father and mother into the trackless wilds of southern Indiana. All the possessions of the family were loaded on the backs of two borrowed horses, and three days were required to make the journey of eighteen miles from the Ohio River to the new home on Little Pigeon Creek, for Thomas Lincoln had to cut his way with an axe through the primeval forest. The land he had chosen was covered with a dense growth of timber, and no shelter awaited him and his family. He must hasten to cut down a lot of young saplings in order to build a shed of poles. This was the home. It shielded the family

only on three sides, - an open-faced camp, as it was

called.

The home built, a field had to be quickly cleared on which to raise the necessary food. Abraham, young as he was, lent a hand, for he was large for his age and could swing an axe. While his father assailed the big trees, he chopped away the rank underbrush. He dropped the seed in the stumpy field in the light of the moon and planted potatoes in the dark of the moon, as all the wise folk of the region did. The minds of the early Hoosiers were filled with ancient superstitions, and they were governed in their daily lives by signs and charms.

It was a wild country, inhabited by a primitive race. Indiana had only just been admitted to the Union as a state when the Lincolns took up their home within its borders. The court-house of the county in which they lived was made of logs. The grand jury sat on a log in the woods, and it was noted of one trial jury that there was not a pair of shoes among them, for nearly every one wore moccasins.

The settlers dressed, as the Indians before them, in the skin of the deer, and never were without their rifles and their long side knives. A farmer's only implements were the axe, the rifle, the maul,

the plough, and the scythe. The brier of the wild thorn was the only pin in a woman's toilet. Tea was brewed from roots dug in the woods.

House raisings and hunting parties were the main social pleasures known to the widely scattered pioneers, aside from the rare event of a wedding, when the people gathered uninvited, and, with practical jokes and all manner of boisterous sport, persecuted the poor bride and groom by night and day. On the hunts, all the game was driven into a common center, where it was slaughtered. Every table depended on the rifle. There was a salt "lick" in the creek near the Lincoln cabin, to which the deer came, and thus Thomas easily kept his family supplied with meat.

Abraham cared nothing for shooting, and the one record of his hunting comes from his own pen in after life. "A few days after the completion of his eighth year," he wrote of himself, "in the absence of his father, a flock of wild turkeys approached the new log cabin, and Abraham, with a rifle gun, standing inside, shot through a crack and killed one of them. He has never since pulled trigger on any larger game."

This new log cabin was built by Thomas Lincoln the second year of his life in Indiana. His family lived in the open-faced pole camp through all the

freezing storms of one winter. In the spring the miserable habitation was turned over to to some Hankses, who had followed their cousin Nancy from Kentucky, and the Lincolns moved into the new home; but even its walls apparently had cracks through which a rifle could be fired at a wild turkey.

Moreover, it had neither a floor nor a window. The poor dwellers within its rude shelter actually lived on the bare earth, which turned to mud in the winter thaws. To shut out the sleet and snow, there was not even a skin to hang over the hole which served for a doorway. In one corner of the only room, two poles stuck between the logs made a bedstead. Nimbly climbing up on pegs driven into the wall, Abraham slept on a heap of loose leaves in the loft. Not a piece of crockery was there in the cabin. Tin and pewter and gourds were the table ware.

The aim was to raise only enough corn to keep the meal box supplied and enough wheat for cakes on Sunday. It hardly paid to raise more, for corn brought little or nothing, and wheat only twentyfive cents a bushel, so far was the farm from the market. Besides, Thomas Lincoln never was a good farmer, and sometimes the family had nothing but potatoes to eat. A neighbor declares that even these were not always cooked, for he recollects