A visitor remembered long afterward a handsome young woman who he thought was Nancy Hanks, singing wildly, whirling about as may once have done the ecstatic women of the woods of Thrace, making her way among equally passionate worshipers, to the foot of the rude altar, and there casting herself into the arms of the man she was to marry.(6) So did thousands of forest women in those seasons when their communion with a mystic loneliness was confessed, when they gave tongue as simply as wild creatures to the nameless stirrings and promptings of that secret woodland where Pan was still the lord.  And the day following the revival, they were again the silent, expressionless, much enduring, long-suffering forest wives, mothers of many children, toilers of the cabins, who cooked and swept and carried fuel by sunlight, and by firelight sewed and spun.

It can easily be understood how these women, as a rule, exerted little influence on their sons.  Their imaginative side was too deeply hidden, the nature of their pleasures too secret, too mysterious.  Male youth, following its obvious pleasure, went with the men to the hunt.  The women remained outsiders.  The boy who chose to do likewise, was the incredible exception.  In him had come to a head the deepest things in the forest life:  the darkly feminine things, its silence, its mysticism, its secretiveness, its tragic patience.  Abraham was such a boy.  It is said that he astounded his father by refusing to own a gun.  He earned terrible whippings by releasing animals caught in traps.  Though he had in fullest measure the forest passion for listening to stories, the ever-popular tales of Indian warfare disgusted him.  But let the tale take on any glint of the mystery of the human soul—­as of Robinson Crusoe alone on his island, or of the lordliness of action, as in Columbus or Washington—­and he was quick with interest.  The stories of talking animals out of Aesop fascinated him.

In this thrilled curiosity about the animals was the side of him least intelligible to men like his father.  It lives in many anecdotes:  of his friendship with a poor dog he had which he called “Honey”; of pursuing a snake through difficult thickets to prevent its swallowing a frog; of loitering on errands at the risk of whippings to watch the squirrels in the tree-tops; of the crowning offense of his childhood, which earned him a mighty beating, the saving of a fawn’s life by scaring it off just as a hunter’s gun was leveled.  And by way of comment on all this, there is the remark preserved in the memory of another boy to whom at the time it appeared most singular, “God might think as much of that little fawn as of some people.”  Of him as of another gentle soul it might have been said that all the animals were his brothers and sisters.(7)