forest; the murderer of the other that far more cruel thing, a savage of
civilization.

When the Indian's shot laid the pioneer farmer low, his second son,
Josiah, ran to a neighboring fort for help, and Mordecai, the eldest,
hurried to the cabin for his rifle. Thomas, a child of six years, was
left alone beside the dead body of his father; and as Mordecai snatched
the gun from its resting-place over the door of the cabin, he saw,
to his horror, an Indian in his war-paint, just stooping to seize the
child. Taking quick aim at a medal on the breast of the savage, he
fired, and the Indian fell dead. The little boy, thus released, ran
to the house, where Mordecai, firing through the loopholes, kept the
Indians at bay until help arrived from the fort.

It was this child Thomas who grew up to be the father of President
Abraham Lincoln. After the murder of his father the fortunes of the
little family grew rapidly worse, and doubtless because of poverty, as
well as by reason of the marriage of his older brothers and sisters,
their home was broken up, and Thomas found himself, long before he was
grown, a wandering laboring boy. He lived for a time with an uncle as
his hired servant, and later he learned the trade of carpenter. He grew
to manhood entirely without education, and when he was twenty-eight
years old could neither read nor write. At that time he married Nancy
Hanks, a good-looking young woman of twenty-three, as poor as himself,
but so much better off as to learning that she was able to teach her
husband to sign his own name. Neither of them had any money, but living
cost little on the frontier in those days, and they felt that his trade
would suffice to earn all that they should need. Thomas took his bride
to a tiny house in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, where they lived for about a
year, and where a daughter was born to them.

Then they moved to a small farm thirteen miles from Elizabethtown, which
they bought on credit, the country being yet so new that there were
places to be had for mere promises to pay. Farms obtained on such terms
were usually of very poor quality, and this one of Thomas Lincoln's
was no exception to the rule. A cabin ready to be occupied stood on it,
however; and not far away, hidden in a pretty clump of trees and bushes,
was a fine spring of water, because of which the place was known as
Rock Spring Farm. In the cabin on this farm the future President of the
United States was born on February 1