That’s my life, and that’s all you or anyone else can make out of it.”  His other references to early days were rare.  He would repeat queer reminiscences of the backwoods to illustrate questions of state; but of his own part in that old life he spoke reluctantly and sadly.  Nevertheless there was once extracted from him an awkward autobiographical fragment, and his friends have collected and recorded concerning his earlier years quite as much as is common in great men’s biographies or can as a rule be reproduced with its true associations.  Thus there are tales enough of the untaught student’s perseverance, and of the boy giant’s gentleness and prowess; tales, too, more than enough in proportion, of the fun which varied but did not pervade his existence, and of the young rustic’s occasional and somewhat oafish pranks.  But, in any conception we may form as to the growth of his mind and character, this fact must have its place, that to the man himself the thought of his early life was unattractive, void of self-content over the difficulties which he had conquered, and void of romantic fondness for vanished joys of youth.

Much the same may be said of his ancestry and family connections.  Contempt for lowly beginnings, abhorrent as it is to any honest mind, would to Lincoln’s mind have probably been inconceivable, but he lacked that interest in ancestry which is generally marked in his countrymen, and from talk of his nearer progenitors he seems to have shrunk with a positive sadness of which some causes will soon be apparent.  Since his death it has been ascertained that in 1638 one Samuel Lincoln of Norwich emigrated to Massachusetts.  Descent from him could be claimed by a prosperous family in Virginia, several of whom fought on the Southern side in the Civil War.  One Abraham Lincoln, grandfather of the President and apparently a grandson of Samuel, crossed the mountains from Virginia in 1780 and settled his family in Kentucky, of which the nearer portions had recently been explored.  One morning four years later he was at work near his cabin with Mordecai, Josiah, and Thomas, his sons, when a shot from the bushes near by brought him down.  Mordecai ran to the house, Josiah to a fort, which was close to them.  Thomas, aged six, stayed by his father’s body.  Mordecai seized a gun and, looking through the window, saw an Indian in war paint stooping to pick up Thomas.  He fired and killed the savage, and, when Thomas had run into the cabin, continued firing at others who appeared among the bushes.  Shortly Josiah returned with soldiers from the fort, and the Indians ran off, leaving Abraham the elder dead.  Mordecai, his heir-at-law, prospered.  We hear of him long after as an old man of substance and repute in Western Illinois.  He had decided views about Indians.  The sight of a redskin would move him to strange excitement; he would disappear into the bushes with his gun, and his conscience as a son and a sportsman would not be satisfied till he had stalked and shot him.  We are further informed that he was a “good old man.”  Josiah also moved to Illinois, and it is pleasant to learn that he also was a good old man, and, as became a good old man, prospered pretty well.  But President Lincoln and his sister knew neither these excellent elders nor any other of their father’s kin.