a supposed better farm further west, always with a mortgage on him.  Abraham, when he was a struggling professional man, helped him with money as well as he could.  We have his letter to the old man on his death-bed, a letter of genuine but mild affection with due words of piety.  He explains that illness in his own household makes it impossible for him to pay a last visit to his father, and then, with that curious directness which is common in the families of the poor and has as a rule no sting, he remarks that an interview, if it had been possible, might have given more pain than pleasure to both.  Everybody has insisted from the first how little Abraham took after his father, but more than one of the traits attributed to Thomas will certainly reappear.

Abraham, as a man, when for once he spoke of his mother, whom he very seldom mentioned, spoke with intense feeling for her motherly care.  “I owe,” he said, “everything that I am to her.”  It pleased him in this talk to explain by inheritance from her the mental qualities which distinguished him from the house of Lincoln, and from others of the house of Hanks.  She was, he said, the illegitimate daughter of a Virginian gentleman, whose name he did not know, but from whom as he guessed the peculiar gifts, of which he could not fail to be conscious, were derived.

Sarah his sister was married at Gentryville to one Mr. Grigsby.  The Grigsbys were rather great people, as people went in Gentryville.  It is said to have become fixed in the boy’s mind that the Grigsbys had not treated Sarah well; and this was the beginning of certain woes.

Sarah Bush Lincoln, his stepmother, was good to him and he to her.  Above all she encouraged him in his early studies, to which a fretful housewife could have opposed such terrible obstacles.  She lived to hope that he might not be elected President for fear that enemies should kill him, and she lived to have her fear fulfilled.  His affectionate care over her continued to the end.  She lived latterly with her son John Johnston.  Abraham’s later letters to this companion of his youth deserve to be looked up in the eight large volumes called his Works, for it is hard to see how a man could speak or act better to an impecunious friend who would not face his own troubles squarely.  It is sad that the “ever your affectionate brother” of the earlier letters declines to “yours sincerely” in the last; but it is an honest decline of affection, for the man had proved to be cheating his mother, and Abraham had had to stop it.

Two of the cousinhood, Dennis Hanks, a character of comedy, and John Hanks, the serious and steady character of the connection, deserve mention.  They and John Johnston make momentary reappearances again.  Otherwise the whole of Abraham Lincoln’s kindred are now out of the story.  They have been disposed of thus hastily at the outset, not because they were discreditable or slight people, but because Lincoln