The varied amusements common to our day were not within their reach.  The period of the circus, the political speech, and the itinerant show had not yet come.  Schools, as we have seen, and probably meetings or church services, were irregular, to be had only at long intervals.  Primitive athletic games and commonplace talk, enlivened by frontier jests and stories, formed the sum of social intercourse when half a dozen or a score of settlers of various ages came together at a house-raising or corn-husking, or when mere chance brought them at the same time to the post-office or the country store.  On these occasions, however, Abraham was, according to his age, always able to contribute his full share or more.  Most of his natural aptitudes equipped him especially to play his part well.  He had quick intelligence, ready sympathy, a cheerful temperament, a kindling humor, a generous and helpful spirit.  He was both a ready talker and appreciative listener.  By virtue of his tall stature and unusual strength of sinew and muscle, he was from the beginning a leader in all athletic games; by reason of his studious habits and his extraordinarily retentive memory he quickly became the best story-teller among his companions.  Even the slight training he gained from his studies greatly quickened his perceptions and broadened and steadied the strong reasoning faculty with which nature had endowed him.

As the years of his youth passed by, his less gifted comrades learned to accept his judgments and to welcome his power to entertain and instruct them.  On his own part, he gradually learned to write not merely with the hand, but also with the mind—­to think.  It was an easy transition for him from remembering the jingle of a commonplace rhyme to the constructing of a doggerel verse, and he did not neglect the opportunity of practising his penmanship in such impromptus.  Tradition also relates that he added to his list of stories and jokes humorous imitations from the sermons of eccentric preachers.  But tradition has very likely both magnified and distorted these alleged exploits of his satire and mimicry.  All that can be said of them is that his youth was marked by intellectual activity far beyond that of his companions.

It is an interesting coincidence that nine days before the birth of Abraham Lincoln Congress passed the act to organize the Territory of Illinois, which his future life and career were destined to render so illustrious.  Another interesting coincidence may be found in the fact that in the same year (1818) in which Congress definitely fixed the number of stars and stripes in the national flag, Illinois was admitted as a State to the Union.  The Star of Empire was moving westward at an accelerating speed.  Alabama was admitted in 1819, Maine in 1820, Missouri in 1821.  Little by little the line of frontier settlement was pushing itself toward the Mississippi.  No sooner had the pioneer built him a cabin and opened his little farm, than during every summer canvas-covered wagons wound their toilsome way over the new-made roads into the newer wilderness, while his eyes followed them with wistful eagerness.  Thomas Lincoln and his Pigeon Creek relatives and neighbors could not forever withstand the contagion of this example, and at length they yielded to the irrepressible longing by a common impulse.  Mr. Lincoln writes: