slaves to work the tobacco fields. These settlers who owned slaves felt themselves much superior to the settlers who had none and made a class by themselves and looked down upon the white men who had no slaves, just as they did in the Southern States. Now, Thomas Lincoln was a very poor man. He was ignorant also, for when his father was killed by Indians his mother had had to bring up her sons as she could and had been able to give them no advantages. But the Lincolns had always been well-to-do before that time, and it was not pleasant to Thomas to have himself and his family looked down upon as if they were good for nothing because he was not a slave owner. It may be that he did not like slavery, anyway. But his son thought that it was also because land titles were so defective in Kentucky that he resolved not to stay there.

So, Thomas made up his mind that he would move to Indiana. It cannot be denied that he was fond of moving, at any rate; for he did it so many times.

What an easy thing it would be to move from Kentucky into Indiana nowadays. But the manner in which Thomas Lincoln did it, not only proved his own poverty, but showed also how difficult travel of any kind was at that time. He built a raft and put on it his carpenter's

tools and ten barrels of whiskey, a part of the pay he had received in barter for his place, and his heavier goods of the household. Then he pushed off all by himself and floated down the Rolling Fork on which his farm was, to the Ohio River. When he landed he found a way to carry his goods into Spencer County where he had determined to settle. He left them there with a settler, crossed the Ohio again and then went back to his home on foot.

While he was away, his wife went with her little son Abraham to visit and take leave of the grave of the little child she had buried in the wilderness. Abraham always remembered this.

The removal was made on the backs of three horses, two of these borrowed. A little bedding and clothing, a few pans and kettles were all they had. The father's kit of tools was to make their furniture, and his rifle to give them their food. At the settler's where Lincoln had left his tools and his goods, he hired a wagon and they cut their way through the wilderness to a place on Little Pigeon Creek, near Gentryville which was to be their new home. It was a fine forest country.

His wife and children helped, and Lincoln built what was called "a half-faced camp." It was made of poles and protected the people in it from the weather on three sides but was all

open on the fourth. Into it flooded the winter rains and drifted the winter snows. The family lived in this place for a whole year while Lincoln was clearing a patch for planting corn and building a rough cabin for their use. This was not finished when they moved into it; but the family of Sparrows had come there from Kentucky, and they wanted the camp. So the Lincolns took possession of the cabin, and it seemed to them so comfortable after the wretched place they had been living in that they staid there for a year or two without doors or windows or floor. Thomas raised enough corn to live on; the forest with game was all around them; near his cabin he could shoot a deer readily. This would give them meat for days and leather for breeches and shoes. They had the roughest furniture; and Abraham when a boy used to climb up into his bed of leaves in the loft by a ladder made of wooden pins driven into the logs of the cabin. Abraham was between seven and eight years old when they moved to Indiana.

In the autumn of 1818, when he was a little over nine years old, he lost his mother. It was no wonder. She was a delicate young woman and could not endure the hardships of her life. The woods were full of malaria, and that autumn a form of fever attacked many of the

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little community where Lincoln lived. Sparrows died of it; and soon after Nancy Hanks Lincoln. They were all three buried in a little clearing in the dense forest all around the home of the Lincolns. The little son mourned with his father that there had been no Christian service at his mother's burial. Little Abraham in the few months that he had gone to school in Kentucky had learned to read and write, and, child as he was, he had kept practicing his writing on sand and the bark of trees, so that he not only forgot nothing that he had learned, but he gained, and could write a letter after a fashion. Both he and his father thought of the good Parson Elkin whom they had left in Kentucky; and Abraham wrote him asking him to come over to them and preach a sermon over his mother's grave. It had taken the Lincolns seven days to reach their new home from their old one on Knob Creek. But although the preacher could travel faster, it was a hundred miles through the wilderness from his home. Abraham had heard him preach, and from him had received his first ideas of public speaking.

The good man came to the sorrowing family. The whole neighborhood was told; news went from schoolhouse to schoolhouse and every family within twenty miles learned of his com

ing. There were two hundred persons gathered to listen to him. Some came in the rudest carts; some on horseback, two or three on a horse; some in wagons drawn by oxen; and some on foot. Then they went to the little grave under the tree. Parson Elkin prayed and sang, and preached a sermon upon this beautiful Christian woman. The memory of that scene and of the preacher's words lived in little Abraham's heart. Years afterward he said to a friend: "All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother-blessings on her memory!"'

Both father and mother believed in God; and we know that Abraham Lincoln always believed deeply in Him through all the great trials and responsibilities of his life. His mother could read; and when once in a great while a book came their way, she would read it to her children, who would listen to her with infinite delight. But from her patient and beautiful life they learned most of all.

With so much lonely and sad in his early life, it was no wonder that even when Abraham Lincoln grew to be a man he had moods of melancholy, as well as times of gayety when he could make everybody about him laugh at his droll stories and his bright sayings.

But while he suffered and remembered, he