est, 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 not have peace till this was done. Shadowy as she
is, ghostlike across the page of history, it is plain that she was a
reality to her son. He not only loved her but revered her. He believed
that from her he had inherited the better part of his genius. Many years
after her death he said, "God bless my mother; all that I am or ever
hope to be I owe to her."

Nancy was not long without a successor. Thomas Lincoln, the next year,
journeyed back to Kentucky and returned in triumph to Indiana, bringing
as his wife, an old flame of his who had married, had been widowed, and
was of a mind for further adventures. This Sarah Bush Lincoln, of
less distinction than Nancy, appears to have been steadier-minded and
stronger-willed. Even before this, Thomas had left the half-faced camp
and moved into a cabin. But such a cabin! It had neither door, nor
window, nor floor. Sally Lincoln required her husband to make of it a
proper house--by the standards of Pigeon Creek. She had brought with her
as her dowry a wagonload of furniture. These comforts together with her
strong will began a new era of relative comfort in the Lincoln cabin.(1)

Sally Lincoln was a kind stepmother to Abraham who became strongly
attached to her. In the rough and nondescript community of Pigeon Creek,
a world of weedy farms, of miserable mud roads, of log farm-houses, the
family life that was at least tolerable. The sordid misery described
during her regime emerged from wretchedness to a state of by all the
recorders of Lincoln's early days seems to have ended about his twelfth
year. At least, the vagrant suggestion disappeared. Though the life
that succeeded was void of luxury, though it was rough, even brutal,
dominated by a coarse, peasant-like view of things, it was scarcely by
peasant sta