as within
fifteen miles of the Ohio. It lay in that southerly fringe of Indiana
which received early in the century many families of much the same
estate, character and origin as the Lincolns,--poor whites of the edges
of the great forest working outward toward the prairies. Located on good
land not far from a great highway, the Ohio, it illustrated in its
rude prosperity a transformation that went on unobserved in many such
settlements, the transformation of the wandering forester of the lower
class into a peasant farmer. Its life was of the earth, earthy; though
it retained the religious traditions of the forest, their significance
was evaporating; mysticism was fading into emotionalism; the
camp-meeting was degenerating into a picnic. The supreme social event,
the wedding, was attended by festivities that filled twenty-four hours:
a race of male guests in the forenoon with a bottle of whisky for a
prize; an Homeric dinner at midday; "an afternoon of rough games and
outrageous practical jokes; a supper and dance at night interrupted
by the successive withdrawals of the bride and groom, attended by
ceremonies and jests of more than Rabelaisian crudeness; and a noisy
dispersal next day."(3) The intensities of the forest survived in hard
drinking, in the fury of the fun-making, and in the hunt. The forest
passion for storytelling had in no way decreased.

In this atmosphere, about eighteen and nineteen, Abraham shot up
suddenly from a slender boy to a huge, raw-honed, ungainly man, six feet
four inches tall, of unusual muscular strength. His strength was one of
the fixed conditions of his development. It delivered him from all fear
of his fellows. He had plenty of peculiarities. He was ugly, awkward;
he lacked the wanton appetites of the average sensual man. And these
peculiarities without his great strength as his warrant might have
brought him into ridicule. As it was, whatever his peculiarities, in
a society like that of Pigeon Creek, the man who could beat all
competitors, wrestling or boxing, was free from molestation. But Lincoln
instinctively had another aim in life than mere freedom to be himself.
Two characteristics that were so significant in his childhood continued
with growing vitality in his young manhood: his placidity and his
intense sense of comradeship. The latter, however, had undergone a
change. It was no longer the comradeship of the wild creatures. That
spurt of physical expansion, the swift rank gro