him at the age of twenty-three, she was a Dorcas full of good works and alms-deeds which she did.

Thomas Lincoln had no capacity for the accumulation of property and was infected with the nomadic spirit of the emigrant. In the forest of Hardin County, Ky., he built a log-cabin and thither carried his faithful wife with her slender outfit. There, on the 12th day of February, 1809, Abraham, their second child, was born. Even in that woodland solitude, where neighbors were few and scattered, Nancy Lincoln soon became celebrated. She taught other wives how to nurse the sick and to make their homes attractive to their husbands. Her log-cabin was no longer a cheerless, barn-like structure. Flowers blossomed around it, honeysuckles and vines climbed over it, and song-birds built their nests in its recesses. She was a model of wifely industry. No duty of the household was neglected. She had already taught her husband how to read and write, and had brought his rather coarse nature under her gentle, refining influence. With the birth of children a new sense of religious duty pervaded her soul. Her boy must know how to read and must be instructed in the Word of God. She gave him a daily lesson, while she was watched by an affectionate husband proud of his home, his wife, and his boy.

This family circle was too happy to remain long unbroken. When her son was nine years old, Nancy Lincoln sickened and died, at the early age of thirtyfive. Other boys in solitary homes who have loved and lost their mothers will know by their own experience how desolate the life of young Lincoln was when his mother went out of it. What kindly heart will not beat more tenderly over the first recorded act

of his life? The kind hands of neighbors had laid the mother to rest in her forest grave, with many tears but without a blessing or a prayer; for the nearest minister lived a hundred miles away. It grieved the heart of her son that this must be. And so it comes to pass that our first view of the motherless boy shows him in the act of making use, perhaps for the first time, of the art which his mother had taught him, in writing a letter to the travelling preacher whom she had known and esteemed, begging him to come and preach a sermon at her grave. Weeks later, riding a hundred miles through the pathless woods on horseback to reach the place, the preacher came. The father, daughter, and son, with the neighbors far and near, gathered in one of "God's first temples," and there beneath a spreading sycamore the preacher told the story and enforced the lesson of the pure and gentle life of Nancy Lincoln. It was not strange that true heart loved her until his dying day; that sitting in the Executive Mansion he should have said, "All that I am or hope to be I owe to my mother," or that when in his presence one spoke of strong sympathy with sorrow as a characteristic of the poor among the mountains, he replied, "I know from my own experience that it is just as strong in the forest and on the prairie."

It was from his father that Abraham Lincoln derived his lofty stature, giant frame, iron muscles, and elastic step, his long, sinewy arms and mighty strength. His mother gave him his temperament, melancholy yet not morose, his reverence for the word and works of God, and his sensitive conscience. The union of unlike parental forces invested him with a courage that knew no fear and a heart capacious

His receptive na

enough for the sorrows of a race. ture, shut up in forest solitudes, was developed by association with men until it was filled with a human sympathy which made him a popular leader and bound other men to him with hooks of steel. His lofty integrity, love of justice, and hatred for all forms of tyranny and cruelty had the same origin.

By a second marriage, when his son was eleven years old, his father brought to his cabin another noble woman. She was a widow with three children, but with true impartiality she became for the son of Nancy Lincoln a second devoted mother. How well he loved her was proved by the last visit he made before leaving Springfield for Washington, in February, 1861. It was paid to her. She was seized with the spirit of prophecy. She embraced and kissed him, predicted his death by violence, and said that in this world she should never see him again.

It has been written by his biographers that the only books accessible to Lincoln in his youth were the Bible, "The Pilgrim's Progress," "The Poems of Burns," and "Weems' Life of Washington." No youth suffers any deprivation who has access to these volumes. Their influence upon young Lincoln was apparent in all his after-life. Except the instructions of his mother, the Bible more powerfully controlled the intellectual development of the son than all other causes combined. He memorized many of its chapters and had them perfectly at his command. Early in his professional life he learned that the most useful of all books to the public speaker is the Bible. After 1857 he seldom made a speech which did not comprise quotations from the Bible. The poems of the Ayrshire ploughman developed his

poetic fancy, Bunyan's immortal dream taught him the force of figurative language, and the simple story of Parson Weems made him familiar with the noble qualities of Washington. In the poverty of his early life there were many deprivations, but the want of good books was not one of them.

The step-mother and the father encouraged their son to make use of every opportunity to learn. One of his teachers remembers him as his most eager and diligent scholar, arrayed in a buckskin suit with a cap made from the skin of a raccoon, coming with a worn-out arithmetic in his hands to begin his studies in the higher branches. But all the exertions of his parents could not give him a school attendance in all of more than a single year.

There are stories of his school life which gave promise of his future eminence. He was slow to anger; personal insult or ridicule could not provoke him, but no brute who attacked a weaker boy was safe from his punishment. Once he came upon six boys, each older than himself, who were drowning a kitten. He bounded upon them like a panther, and one after another the six went down under his blows. Then he released and fondled the poor kitten, and cried over it like a girl. He was ambitious to win a prize in a spelling-match. A poor girl was his only dangerous competitor. She hesitated over a letter which had she missed would have given the prize to Lincoln. Instantly he framed his lips into the form of the right letter; the blushing girl won the prize and the defeated boy was happy.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN (CONTINUED) HIS FAILURESTHE FARM LABORER-THE FLAT-BOATMAN— THE FIGHTER-THE MERCHANT-THE SUR

VEYOR.

THE temptation is strong to linger over many of the incidents of his youth, but I must touch only upon those which perceptively influenced his career. At the age of nineteen he made a voyage to New Orleans on a flat-boat. Himself and the son of his employer constituted the officers and crew. On the voyage they were attacked by seven negroes who intended to capture the valuable cargo. Spurning all but the arms which nature had given him, Lincoln whipped the whole attacking party.

In New Orleans an event occurred which has been much distorted in many Lincoln biographies. He there attended a slave auction and saw a picture, never in this republic to be exhibited again. It was a young colored woman who stood on the auction block to be sold. Her limbs and bosom were bare. Traders in human flesh felt the density of her muscles as if she had been a quadruped. No doubt the young Kentuckian was disgusted, but there is no proof that this was his first object-lesson in human slavery, or that, as so often has been asserted, he turned to his companion and said, "If I ever get a chance to hit slavery, I will hit it hard." Such an