himself when he began to find his footing in the world seems to have felt sadly that his family was just so much to him and no more.  The dearest of his recollections attached to premature death; the next to chronic failure.  Rightly or wrongly (and we know enough about heredity now to expect any guess as to its working in a particular case to be wrong) he attributed the best that he had inherited to a licentious connection and a nameless progenitor.  Quite early he must have been intensely ambitious, and discovered in himself intellectual power; but from his twelfth year to his twenty-first there was hardly a soul to comprehend that side of him.  This chill upon his memory unmistakably influenced the particular complexion of his melancholy.  Unmistakably too he early learnt to think that he was odd, that his oddity was connected with his strength, that he might be destined to stand alone and capable of so standing.

The life of the farming pioneer in what was then the Far West afforded a fair prospect of laborious independence.  But at least till Lincoln was grown up, when a time of rapid growth and change set in, it offered no hope of quickly gotten wealth, and it imposed severe hardship on all.  The country was thickly wooded; the settler had before him at the outset heavy toil in clearing the ground and in building some rude shelter,—­a house or just a “half-faced camp,” that is, a shed with one side open to the weather such as that in which the Lincoln family passed their first winter near Gentryville.  The site once chosen and the clearing once made, there was no such ease of cultivation or such certain fertility as later settlers found yet further west when the development of railways, of agricultural machinery, and of Eastern or European markets had opened out to cultivation the enormous stretches of level grass plain beyond the Mississippi.

Till population had grown a good deal, pioneer families were largely occupied in producing for themselves with their own hands what, in their hardy if not always frugal view, were the necessities and comforts of life.  They had no Eastern market for their produce, for railways did not begin to be made till 1840, and it was many years before they crossed the Eastern mountains.  An occasional cargo was taken on a flat-bottomed boat down the nearest creek, as a stream is called in America, into the Ohio and so by the innumerable windings of the Mississippi to New Orleans; but no return cargo could be brought up stream.  Knives and axes were the most precious objects to be gained by trade; woollen fabrics were rare in the West, when Lincoln was born, and the white man and woman, like the red whom they had displaced, were chiefly dressed in deer skins.  The woods abounded in game, and in the early stages of the development of the West a man could largely support himself by his gun.  The cold of every winter is there great, and an occasional winter made itself long remembered,