were about the child; and though we may gladly avail ourselves of the possibility of believing his mother to have been superior to all the rest of it, yet she could by no means leaven the mass.  The father[18] was by calling a carpenter, but not good at his trade, a shiftless migratory squatter by invincible tendency, and a very ignorant man, for a long while able only to form the letters which made his signature, though later he extended his accomplishments a little.  He rested not much above the very bottom of existence in the pioneer settlements, apparently without capacity or desire to do better.  The family was imbued with the peculiar, intense, but unenlightened form of Christianity, mingled with curious superstition, prevalent in the backwoods, and begotten by the influence of the vast wilderness upon illiterate men of a rude native force.  It interests scholars to trace the evolutions of religious faiths, but it might be not less suggestive to study the retrogression of religion into superstition.  Thomas was as restless in matters of creed as of residence, and made various changes in both during his life.  These were, however, changes without improvement, and, so far as he was concerned, his son Abraham might have grown up to be what he himself was contented to remain.

It was in the second year after his marriage that Thomas Lincoln made his first removal.  Four years later he made another.  Two or three years afterwards, in the autumn of 1816, he abandoned Kentucky and went into Indiana.  Some writers have given to this migration the interesting character of a flight from a slave-cursed society to a land of freedom, but whatever poetic fitness there might be in such a motive, the suggestion is entirely gratuitous and without the slightest foundation.[19] In making this move, Thomas’s outfit consisted of a trifling parcel of tools and cooking utensils, with ever so little bedding, and four hundred gallons of whiskey.  At his new quarters he built a “half-faced camp” fourteen feet square, that is to say, a covered shed of three sides, the fourth side being left open to the weather.  In this, less snug than the winter’s cave of a bear, the family dwelt for a year, and then were translated to the luxury of a “cabin,” four-walled indeed, but which for a long while had neither floor, door, nor window.  Amid this hardship and wretchedness Nancy Lincoln passed away, October 5, 1818, of that dread and mysterious disease, the scourge of those pioneer communities, known as the “milk-sickness."[20] In a rough coffin, fashioned by her husband “out of green lumber cut with a whip-saw,” she was laid away in the forest clearing, and a few months afterward an itinerant preacher performed some funeral rites over the poor woman’s humble grave.