One might easily imagine this peculiar boy who chose to remain at home while the men went out to slay, as the mere translation into masculinity of his mother, and of her mothers, of all the converging processions of forest women, who had passed from one to another the secret of their mysticism, coloring it many ways in the dark vessels of their suppressed lives, till it reached at last their concluding child.  But this would only in part explain him.  Their mysticism, as after-time was to show, he had undoubtedly inherited.  So, too, from them, it may be, came another characteristic—­that instinct to endure, to wait, to abide the issue of circumstance, which in the days of his power made him to the politicians as unintelligible as once he had been to the forest huntsmen.  Nevertheless, the most distinctive part of those primitive women, the sealed passionateness of their spirits, he never from childhood to the end revealed.  In the grown man appeared a quietude, a sort of tranced calm, that was appalling.  From what part of his heredity did this derive?  Was it the male gift of the forest?  Did progenitors worthier than Thomas somehow cast through him to his alien son that peace they had found in the utter heart of danger, that apparent selflessness which is born of being ever unfailingly on guard?

It is plain that from the first he was a natural stoic, taking his whippings, of which there appear to have been plenty, in silence, without anger.  It was all in the day’s round.  Whippings, like other things, came and went.  What did it matter?  And the daily round, though monotonous, had even for the child a complement of labor.  Especially there was much patient journeying back and forth with meal bags between his father’s cabin and the local mill.  There was a little schooling, very little, partly from Nancy Lincoln, partly from another good woman, the miller’s kind old mother, partly at the crudest of wayside schools maintained very briefly by a wandering teacher who soon wandered on; but out of this schooling very little result beyond the mastery of the A B C.(8) And even at this age, a pathetic eagerness to learn, to invade the wonder of the printed book!  Also a marked keenness of observation.  He observed things which his elders overlooked.  He had a better sense of direction, as when he corrected his father and others who were taking the wrong short-cut to a burning house.  Cool, unexcitable, he was capable of presence of mind.  Once at night when the door of the cabin was suddenly thrown open and a monster appeared on the threshold, a spectral thing in the darkness, furry, with the head of an ox, Thomas Lincoln shrank back aghast; little Abraham, quicker-sighted and quicker-witted, slipped behind the creature, pulled at its furry mantle, and revealed a forest Diana, a bold girl who amused herself playing demon among the shadows of the moon.