same polls. The election books are
now in the city of Springfield, where they can be seen and inspected any
day."

That the foregoing anecdotes bearing on the early life of Abraham
Lincoln are approximately correct is borne out by Lincoln himself. At
the urgent request of Hon. Jesse W. Fell, of Bloomington, Illinois,
Lincoln wrote a sketch of himself to be used during the campaign of
1860. In a note which accompanied the sketch he said: "Herewith is a
little sketch, as you requested. There is not much to it, for the
reason, I suppose, that there is not much of me. If anything be made out
of it I wish it to be modest and not to go beyond the material." The
letter is as follows:

I was born Feb. 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. My parents
were both born in Virginia, of undistinguishable families--second
families, perhaps I should say. My mother, who died in my tenth
year, was of a family of the name of Hanks, some of whom now reside
in Adams, and others in Macon Counties, Illinois. My paternal
grandfather, Abraham Lincoln, emigrated from Rockingham County,
Virginia, to Kentucky, about 1781 or '2, where, a year or two
later, he was killed by Indians, not in battle, but by stealth,
when he was laboring to open a farm in the forest. His ancestors,
who were Quakers, went to Virginia from Berks County, Pennsylvania.
An effort to identify them with the New England family of the same
name, ended in nothing more than a similarity of Christian names in
both families, such as Enoch, Levi, Mordecai, Solomon, Abraham, and
the like.

My father, at the death of his father, was but six years of age,
and he grew up literally without education. He removed from
Kentucky to what is now Spencer County, Indiana, in my eighth year.
We reached our new home about the time the State came into the
Union. It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals
still in the woods. There I grew up. There were some schools, so
called, but no qualification was ever required of a teacher beyond
'readin', writin' and cipherin'' to the Rule of Three. If a
straggler, supposed to understand Latin, happened to sojourn in the
neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizard. There was absolutely
nothing to excite ambition for education. Of course when I came of
age I did not know much. Still, somehow, I could read, write,