On the 5th of October she fell asleep, never to wake again.

Under a big sycamore tree, half a mile from the house, the neighbors dug the grave for the mother of Abraham Lincoln.  And there they buried her in silence and great sorrow.

There was no minister there to conduct religious services.  In all that new country there was no church; and no holy man could be found to speak words of comfort and hope to the grieving ones around the grave.

But the boy, Abraham, remembered a traveling preacher, whom they had known in Kentucky.  The name of this preacher was David Elkin.  If he would only come!

And so, after all was over, the lad sat down and wrote a letter to David Elkin.  He was only a child nine years old, but he believed that the good man would remember his poor mother, and come.

It was no easy task to write a letter.  Paper and ink were not things of common use, as they are with us.  A pen had to be made from the quill of a goose.

But at last the letter was finished and sent away.  How it was carried I do not know; for the mails were few and far between in those days, and postage was very high.  It is more than likely that some friend, who was going into Kentucky, undertook to have it finally handed to the good preacher.

Months passed.  The leaves were again on the trees.  The wild flowers were blossoming in the woods.  At last the preacher came.

He had ridden a hundred miles on horseback; he had forded rivers, and traveled through pathless woods; he had dared the dangers of the wild forest:  all in answer to the lad’s beseeching letter.

He had no hope of reward, save that which is given to every man who does his duty.  He did not know that there would come a time when the greatest preachers in the world would envy him his sad task.

And now the friends and neighbors gathered again under the great sycamore tree.  The funeral sermon was preached.  Hymns were sung.  A prayer was offered.  Words of comfort and sympathy were spoken.

From that time forward the mind of Abraham Lincoln was filled with a high and noble purpose.  In his earliest childhood his mother had taught him to love truth and justice, to be honest and upright among men, and to reverence God.  These lessons he never forgot.

Long afterward, when the world had come to know him as a very great man, he said:  “All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.”

* * * * *

III.—­THE NEW MOTHER.

The log house, which Abraham Lincoln called his home, was now more lonely and cheerless than before.  The sunlight of his mother’s presence had gone out of it forever.

His sister Sarah, twelve years old, was the housekeeper and cook.  His father had not yet found time to lay a floor in the house, or to hang a door.  There were great crevices between the logs, through which the wind and the rain drifted on every stormy day.  There was not much comfort in such a house.