they had linked him with a lost member of a distinguished Puritan family, a certain Mordecai Lincoln who removed to New Jersey, whose descendants became wanderers of the forest and sank speedily to the bottom of the social scale, retaining not the slightest memory of their New England origin.(2) Even in the worst of the forest villages, few couples started married life in less auspicious circumstances than did Nancy and Thomas.  Their home in one of the alleys of Elizabethtown was a shanty fourteen feet square.(3) Very soon after marriage, shiftless Thomas gave up carpentering and took to farming.  Land could be had almost anywhere for almost nothing those days, and Thomas got a farm on credit near where now stands Hodgenville.  Today, it is a famous place, for there, February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln, second child, but first son of Nancy and Thomas, was born.(4)

During most of eight years, Abraham lived in Kentucky.  His father, always adrift in heart, tried two farms before abandoning Kentucky altogether.  A shadowy figure, this Thomas; the few memories of him suggest a superstitious nature in a superstitious community.  He used to see visions in the forest.  Once, it is said, he came home, all excitement, to tell his wife he had seen a giant riding on a lion, tearing up trees by the roots; and thereupon, he took to his bed and kept it for several days.

His son Abraham told this story of the giant on the lion to a playmate of his, and the two boys gravely discussed the existence of ghosts.  Abraham thought his father “didn’t exactly believe in them,” and seems to have been in about the same state of mind himself.  He was quite sure he was “not much” afraid of the dark.  This was due chiefly to the simple wisdom of a good woman, a neighbor, who had taught him to think of the night as a great room that God had darkened even as his friend darkened a room in her house by hanging something over the window.(5)

The eight years of his childhood in Kentucky had few incidents.  A hard, patient, uncomplaining life both for old and young.  The men found their one deep joy in the hunt.  In lesser degree, they enjoyed the revivals which gave to the women their one escape out of themselves.  A strange, almost terrible recovery of the primitive, were those religious furies of the days before the great forest had disappeared.  What other figures in our history are quite so remarkable as the itinerant frontier priests, the circuit-riders as they are now called, who lived as Elijah did, whose temper was very much the temper of Elijah, in whose exalted narrowness of devotion, all that was stern, dark, foreboding—­the very brood of the forest’s innermost heart—­had found a voice.  Their religion was ecstasy in homespun, a glory of violent singing, the release of a frantic emotion, formless but immeasurable, which at all other times, in the severity of the forest routine, gave no sign of its existence.