le, then Hardin, now LaRue County, Kentucky.
When little Abraham was seven years old his father moved to Indiana and
took up a claim near Gentryville, Spencer County, and built a rude
shelter of unhewn logs without a floor, the large opening protected only
by hanging skins. In this discomfort they lived for a year, when they
erected a log cabin. There was plenty of game, but otherwise the fare
was very poor and the life was hard. In 1818 little Abraham's mother,
delicate, refined, pathetic and too frail for such rude life, sickened
and felt that the end was near. She called her little children to her
bed of leaves and skins and told them to "love their kindred and worship
God," and then she died and left them only the memory of her love.

Thomas Lincoln made a rude coffin himself, but there were no ceremonies
at that most pathetic funeral when he laid his young wife in her
desolate grave in the forest. Little Lincoln was nine years old, and the
mystery of death, the pitiless winter, the lone grave, the deep
forest--shivering with his sister in the cold cabin--it all made a deep
impression on the sensitive boy.

Late in the year 1819 Thomas Lincoln went back to Kentucky, and there
courted and married a widow named Sarah Buck Johnston, who had once been
his sweetheart. She brought with her some household goods and her own
three children. She dressed the forlorn little Lincolns in some of the
clothing belonging to her children. She was described as tall, straight
as an Indian, handsome, fair, talkative and proud. Also she had the
abundant strength for hard labor. She and little Abraham learned to love
each other dearly.

Abraham went to school in all less than a year, but this good step-mother
encouraged him to study at home and he read every book he heard of
within a circuit of many miles. He read the Bible, Aesop's Fables,
Murray's English Reader, Robinson Crusoe, The Pilgrim's Progress, A
History of the United States, Weem's Life of Washington and the Revised
Statutes of Indiana. He studied by the fire-light and practiced writing
with a pen made from a buzzard's quill dipped in ink made from brier
roots. He practiced writing on the subjects of Temperance, Government,
and Cruelty to Animals. The unkindness so often common to those frontier
folks shocked his sensitive soul. He practiced speaking by imitating the
itinerant preacher and by telling stories to any who would give him an
audience. He walked fifteen miles to B