nly five years old, moved from Brown county, O., to Shelby county,
Ky., and lived on Little Bullskin, a few miles west of Shelbyville.

My mother, Sarah A. Gibbs, was a daughter of James L. Gibbs and Mary
Ashby, and was born in Loudoun county, Va., April 6, 1808. The family
moved from Virginia to Kentucky in 1810, and lived in Shelbyville.

My grandparents on both sides reared large families of industrious,
thrifty children, and both grandfathers lived to be quite aged, my
mother's father living to be nearly one hundred years old.

My parents were married near Simpsonville, in Shelby county, April 9,
1829, and to them were born thirteen children--five boys and eight
girls--ten of whom lived to be grown. I was the fifth child--two boys
and two girls being older. The oldest child, a boy, died in infancy.
Being poor, both parents and children had to work hard and use strict
economy to make ends meet. We all knew much of the toils and hardships
of life, little of its luxuries. Both parents were blessed with good
constitutions, and had fine native intellects, but they were uneducated
save in the mere rudiments of the common school. They thought that "to
read, write and cipher" as far as the single rule of three, was all the
learning one needed for this life, unless he was going to teach. If my
father's mind had been trained, it would have been one of vast power.
He was philosophical, a good reasoner, and possessed of unusual
discrimination. He had also great coolness and self-possession in
emergencies.

In illustration of the latter statement, there recurs an incident in my
father's life that will bear recital. In those old-fashioned days of
"fist and skull" entertainments on public occasions, it was common for
each county to have its bully. Oldham at different times had
several--men of great muscular build and power, whose chief idea of
fame was that they could "whip anything in the county." My father was a
small man, weighing only one hundred and thirty pounds, and of a
peaceable disposition. Indeed, it was hard to provoke him to pugilistic
measures. But circumstances caused one of these bullies to force a
fight upon him at La Grange, in which the man was whipped so quickly
and so badly that no one knew how it was done. The man himself
accounted for it on the ground that "Mr. Allen came at me smiling."
This caused one or two others, at different times, to seek to
immortalize themselves by doing what the first had failed