wth to his tremendous
stature, swept him apparently across a dim dividing line, out of the
world of birds and beasts and into the world of men. He took the new
world with the same unfailing but also unexcitable curiosity with which
he had taken the other, the world of squirrels, flowers, fawns.

Here as there, the difference from his mother, deep though their
similarities may have been, was sharply evident. Had he been wholly at
one with her religiously, the gift of telling speech which he now began
to display might have led him into a course that would have rejoiced
her heart, might have made him a boy preacher, and later, a great
revivalist. His father and elder sister while on Pigeon Creek joined the
local Baptist Church. But Abraham did not follow them. Nor is there a
single anecdote linking him in any way with the fervors of camp meeting.
On the contrary, what little is remembered, is of a cool aloofness.(4)
The inscrutability of the forest was his--what it gave to the stealthy,
cautious men who were too intent on observing, too suspiciously
watchful, to give vent to their feelings. Therefore, in Lincoln
there was always a double life, outer and inner, the outer quietly
companionable, the inner, solitary, mysterious.

It was the outer life that assumed its first definite phase in the years
on Pigeon Creek. During those years, Lincoln discovered his gift of
story-telling. He also discovered humor. In the employment of both
talents, he accepted as a matter of course the tone of the young
ruffians among whom he dwelt. Very soon this powerful fellow, who could
throw any of them in a wrestle, won the central position among them by a
surer title, by the power to delight. And any one who knows how peasant
schools of art arise--for that matter, all schools of art that are
vital--knows how he did it. In this connection, his famous biographers,
Nicolay and Hay, reveal a certain externality by objecting that a story
attributed to him is ancient. All stories are ancient. Not the tale, but
the telling, as the proverb says, is the thing. In later years, Lincoln
wrote down every good story that he heard, and filed it.(5) When it
reappeared it had become his own. Who can doubt that this deliberate
assimilation, the typical artistic process, began on Pigeon Creek?
Lincoln never would have captured as he did his plowboy audience, set
them roaring with laughter in the intervals of labor, had he not given
them back their own tales do