These reminiscences of Dennis Hanks give the clearest and undoubtedly the most accurate glimpse of Lincoln’s youth.  He says further, referring to the boy’s unusual physical strength:  “My, how he would chop!  His axe would flash and bite into a sugar-tree or sycamore, and down it would come.  If you heard him fellin’ trees in a clearin’ you would say there was three men at work, the way the trees fell.  Abe was never sassy or quarrelsome.  I’ve seen him walk into a crowd of sawin’ rowdies and tell some droll yarn and bust them all up.  It was the same after he got to be a lawyer.  All eyes was on him whenever he riz.  There was suthin’ peculiarsome about him.  I moved from Indiana to Illinois when Abe did.  I bought a little improvement near him, six miles from Decatur.  Here the famous rails were split that were carried round in the campaign.  They were called his rails, but you never can tell.  I split some of ’em.  He was a master hand at maulin’ rails.  I heard him say in a speech once, ‘If I didn’t make these I made many just as good.’  Then the crowd yelled.”

One of his playmates has furnished much that is of interest in regard to the reputation which Lincoln left behind him in the neighborhood where he passed his boyhood and much of his youth.  This witness says:  “Whenever the court was in session he was a frequent attendant.  John A. Breckenridge was the foremost lawyer in the community, and was famed as an advocate in criminal cases.  Lincoln was sure to be present when he spoke.  Doing the chores in the morning, he would walk to Booneville, the county seat of Warwick County, seventeen miles away, then home in time to do the chores at night, repeating this day after day.  The lawyer soon came to know him.  Years afterwards, when Lincoln was President, a venerable gentleman one day entered his office in the White House, and standing before him said:  ‘Mr. President, you don’t know me.’  Mr. Lincoln eyed him sharply for a moment, and then quickly replied with a smile, ’Yes I do.  You are John A. Breckenridge.  I used to walk thirty-four miles a day to hear you plead law in Booneville, and listening to your speeches at the bar first inspired me with the determination to be a lawyer.’”

Lincoln’s love for his gentle mother, and his grief over her untimely death, is a touching story.  Attacked by a fatal disease, the life of Nancy Hanks wasted slowly away.  Day after day her son sat by her bed reading to her such portions of the Bible as she desired to hear.  At intervals she talked to him, urging him to walk in the paths of honor, goodness, and truth.  At last she found rest, and her son gave way to grief that could not be controlled.  In an opening in the timber, a short distance from the cabin, sympathizing friends and neighbors laid her body away and offered sincere prayers above her grave.  The simple service did not seem to the son adequate tribute to the memory of the beloved mother whose loss he so sorely felt, but no minister