'The short and simple annals of the poor.'
That's my life, and that's all you or any one else can make out of it."
In all this he was neither proud nor depreciative of his people. He was simply modest. Nor did he ever outgrow his sympathy with the common people.
CHAPTER III.
EARLY YEARS.
The year 1809 was fruitful in the birth of great men in the Anglo-Saxon
race. In that year were born Charles Darwin, scientist, Alfred
Tennyson, poet, William E. Gladstone, statesman, and, not least,
Abraham Lincoln, liberator.
Thomas Lincoln was left fatherless in early boyhood, and grew up without any schooling or any definite work. For the most part he did odd jobs as they were offered. He called himself a carpenter. But in a day when the outfit of tools numbered only about a half dozen, and when every man was mainly his own carpenter, this trade could not amount to much. Employment was unsteady and pay was small.
Thomas Lincoln, after his marriage to Nancy Hanks, lived in Elizabethtown, Ky., where the first child, Sarah, was born. Shortly after this event he decided to combine farming with his trade of carpentering, and so removed to a farm fourteen miles out, situated in what is now La Rue County, where his wife, on the twelfth day of February, 1809, gave birth to the son who was named Abraham after his grandfather. The child was born in a log cabin of a kind very common in that day and for many years later. It was built four-square and comprised only one room, one window, and a door.
[Illustration: Lincoln's Boyhood Home in Kentucky.]
Here they lived for a little more than four years, when the father removed to another farm about fifteen miles further to the northeast.