Curiously, by a queer sort of natural selection, its people had congregated into life communities not all of one pattern.  There were places as early as the beginning of the century where distinction had appeared.  At other places life was as rude and rough as could be imagined.  There were innumerable farms that were still mere “clearings,” walled by the forest.  But there were other regions where for many a mile the timber had been hewn away, had given place to a ragged continuity of farmland.  In such regions especially if the poorer elements of the forest, spiritually speaking, had drifted thither—­the straggling villages which had appeared were but groups of log cabins huddled along a few neglected lanes.  In central Kentucky, a poor new village was Elizabethtown, unkempt, chokingly dusty in the dry weather, with muddy streams instead of streets during the rains, a stench of pig-sties at the back of its cabins, but everywhere looking outward glimpses of a lovely meadow land.

At Elizabethtown in 1806 lived Joseph Hanks, a carpenter, also his niece Nancy Hanks.  Poor people they were, of the sort that had been sucked into the forest in their weakness, or had been pushed into it by a social pressure they could not resist; not the sort that had grimly adventured its perils or gaily courted its lure.  Their source was Virginia.  They were of a thriftless, unstable class; that vagrant peasantry which had drifted westward to avoid competition with slave labor.  The niece, Nancy, has been reputed illegitimate.  And though tradition derives her from the predatory amour of an aristocrat, there is nothing to sustain the tale except her own appearance.  She had a bearing, a cast of feature, a tone, that seemed to hint at higher social origins than those of her Hanks relatives.  She had a little schooling; was of a pious and emotional turn of mind; enjoyed those amazing “revivals” which now and then gave an outlet to the pent-up religiosity of the village; and she was almost handsome.(1)

History has preserved no clue why this girl who was rather the best of her sort chose to marry an illiterate apprentice of her uncle’s, Thomas Lincoln, whose name in the forest was spelled “Linkhorn.”  He was a shiftless fellow, never succeeding at anything, who could neither read nor write.  At the time of his birth, twenty-eight years before, his parents—­drifting, roaming people, struggling with poverty—­were dwellers in the Virginia mountains.  As a mere lad, he had shot an Indian—­one of the few positive acts attributed to him—­and his father had been killed by Indians.  There was a “vague tradition” that his grandfather had been a Pennsylvania Quaker who had wandered southward through the forest mountains.  The tradition angered him.  Though he appears to have had little enough—­at least in later years—­of the fierce independence of the forest, he resented a Quaker ancestry as an insult.  He had no suspicion that in after years the zeal of genealogists would track his descent until