m Lincoln, second
child, but first son of Nancy and Thomas, was born.(4)

During most of eight years, Abraham lived in Kentucky. His father,
always adrift in heart, tried two farms before abandoning Kentucky
altogether. A shadowy figure, this Thomas; the few memories of him
suggest a superstitious nature in a superstitious community. He used
to see visions in the forest. Once, it is said, he came home, all
excitement, to tell his wife he had seen a giant riding on a lion,
tearing up trees by the roots; and thereupon, he took to his bed and
kept it for several days.

His son Abraham told this story of the giant on the lion to a playmate
of his, and the two boys gravely discussed the existence of ghosts.
Abraham thought his father "didn't exactly believe in them," and seems
to have been in about the same state of mind himself. He was quite sure
he was "not much" afraid of the dark. This was due chiefly to the simple
wisdom of a good woman, a neighbor, who had taught him to think of the
night as a great room that God had darkened even as his friend darkened
a room in her house by hanging something over the window.(5)

The eight years of his childhood in Kentucky had few incidents. A hard,
patient, uncomplaining life both for old and young. The men found their
one deep joy in the hunt. In lesser degree, they enjoyed the revivals
which gave to the women their one escape out of themselves. A strange,
almost terrible recovery of the primitive, were those religious furies
of the days before the great forest had disappeared. What other figures
in our history are quite so remarkable as the itinerant frontier
priests, the circuit-riders as they are now called, who lived as Elijah
did, whose temper was very much the temper of Elijah, in whose exalted
narrowness of devotion, all that was stern, dark, foreboding--the very
brood of the forest's innermost heart--had found a voice. Their religion
was ecstasy in homespun, a glory of violent singing, the release of a
frantic emotion, formless but immeasurable, which at all other times, in
the severity of the forest routine, gave no sign of its existence.

A visitor remembered long afterward a handsome young woman who he
thought was Nancy Hanks, singing wildly, whirling about as may once have
done the ecstatic women of the woods of Thrace, making her way among
equally passionate worshipers, to the foot of the rude altar, and there
casting herself into the arms of the man she was to marr