Lincoln | Page 7

appalling. From what part of his heredity did this derive?
Was it the male gift of the forest? Did progenitors worthier than
Thomas somehow cast through him to his alien son that peace they had
found in the utter heart of danger, that apparent selflessness which is
born of being ever unfailingly on guard?
It is plain that from the first he was a natural stoic, taking his whippings,
of which there appear to have been plenty, in silence, without anger. It
was all in the day's round. Whippings, like other things, came and went.
What did it matter? And the daily round, though monotonous, had even
for the child a complement of labor. Especially there was much patient
journeying back and forth with meal bags between his father's cabin
and the local mill. There was a little schooling, very little, partly from
Nancy Lincoln, partly from another good woman, the miller's kind old
mother, partly at the crudest of wayside schools maintained very briefly
by a wandering teacher who soon wandered on; but out of this
schooling very little result beyond the mastery of the A B C.[8] And
even at this age, a pathetic eagerness to learn, to invade the wonder of
the printed book! Also a marked keenness of observation. He observed
things which his elders overlooked. He had a better sense of direction,
as when he corrected his father and others who were taking the wrong
short-cut to a burning house. Cool, unexcitable, he was capable of
presence of mind. Once at night when the door of the cabin was
suddenly thrown open and a monster appeared on the threshold, a
spectral thing in the darkness, furry, with the head of an ox, Thomas
Lincoln shrank back aghast; little Abraham, quicker-sighted and
quicker-witted, slipped behind the creature, pulled at its furry mantle,
and revealed a forest Diana, a bold girl who amused herself playing
demon among the shadows of the moon.
Seven years passed and his eighth birthday approached. All this while

Thomas Lincoln had somehow kept his family in food, but never had
he money in his pocket. His successive farms, bought on credit, were
never paid for. An incurable vagrant, he came at last to the
psychological moment when he could no longer impose himself on his
community. He must take to the road in a hazard of new fortune.
Indiana appeared to him the land of promise. Most of his
property--such as it was--except his carpenter's tools, he traded for
whisky, four hundred gallons. Somehow he obtained a rattletrap wagon
and two horses.
The family appear to have been loath to go. Nancy Lincoln had long
been ailing and in low spirits, thinking much of what might happen to
her children after her death. Abraham loved the country-side, and he
had good friends in the miller and his kind old mother. But the vagrant
Thomas would have his way. In the brilliancy of the Western autumn,
with the ruined woods flaming scarlet and gold, these poor people took
their last look at the cabin that had been their wretched shelter, and set
forth into the world.[9]

II THE MYSTERIOUS YOUTH
Vagrants, or little better than vagrants, were Thomas Lincoln and his
family making their way to Indiana. For a year after they arrived they
were squatters, their home an "open-faced camp," that is, a shanty with
one wall missing, and instead of chimney, a fire built on the open side.
In that mere pretense of a house, Nancy Lincoln and her children spent
the winter of 1816-1817. Then Thomas resorted to his familiar practice
of taking land on credit. The Lincolns were now part of a "settlement"
of seven or eight families strung along a little stream known as Pigeon
Creek. Here Thomas entered a quarter- section of fair land, and in the
course of the next eleven years succeeded--wonderful to relate--in
paying down sufficient money to give him title to about half.
Meanwhile, poor fading Nancy went to her place. Pigeon Creek was an
out-of-the-way nook in the still unsettled West, and Nancy during the
two years she lived there could not have enjoyed much of the

consolation of her religion. Perhaps now and then she had ghostly
council of some stray circuit-rider. But for her the days of the ecstasies
had gone by; no great revival broke the seals of the spirit, stirred its
deep waters, along Pigeon Creek. There was no religious service when
she was laid to rest in a coffin made of green lumber and fashioned by
her husband. Months passed, the snow lay deep, before a passing
circuit-rider held a burial service over her grave. Tradition has it that
the boy Abraham brought this about very likely, at ten years old, he felt
that her troubled spirit could