at in that early day
there was plenty of land to be bought for mere promises to pay; under
the disadvantage, however, that farms to be had on these terms were
usually of a very poor quality, on which energetic or forehanded men did
not care to waste their labor. It was a kind of land generally known in
the West as "barrens"--rolling upland, with very thin, unproductive
soil. Its momentary usefulness was that it was partly cleared and
cultivated, that an indifferent cabin stood on it ready to be occupied,
and that it had one specially attractive as well as useful feature--a
fine spring of water, prettily situated amid a graceful clump of
foliage, because of which the place was called Rock Spring Farm. The
change of abode was perhaps in some respects an improvement upon
Elizabethtown. To pioneer families in deep poverty, a little farm
offered many more resources than a town lot--space, wood, water, greens
in the spring, berries in the summer, nuts in the autumn, small game
everywhere--and they were fully accustomed to the loss of
companionship. On this farm, and in this cabin, the future President of
the United States was born, on the 12th of February, 1809, and here the
first four years of his childhood were spent.

When Abraham was about four years old the Lincoln home was changed to a
much better farm of two hundred and thirty-eight acres on Knob Creek,
six miles from Hodgensville, bought by Thomas Lincoln, again on credit,
for the promise to pay one hundred and eighteen pounds. A year later he
conveyed two hundred acres of it by deed to a new purchaser. In this new
home the family spent four years more, and while here Abraham and his
sister Sarah began going to A B C schools. Their first teacher was
Zachariah Riney, who taught near the Lincoln cabin; the next, Caleb
Hazel, at a distance of about four miles.

Thomas Lincoln was evidently one of those easy-going, good-natured men
who carry the virtue of contentment to an extreme. He appears never to
have exerted himself much beyond the attainment of a necessary
subsistence. By a little farming and occasional jobs at his trade, he
seems to have supplied his family with food and clothes. There is no
record that he made any payment on either of his farms. The fever of
westward emigration was in the air, and, listening to glowing accounts
of rich lands and newer settlements in Indiana, he had neither valuable
possessions nor cheerful associations to restrain the natural im