Emigrant wagons were passing toward Illinois, the "prairie country," as it was called, over all the roads of Indiana. The "schooners," as these wagons were called, were everywhere to be seen on the great prairie sea. It was the time of the great emigration. Jasper had never dreamed of a life like this before. He looked into one prairie wagon, whose young driver had gone for water. He turned to Waubeno, and said:
"What do you think I saw?"
"Guns to destroy the Indians; trinkets and trifles to cheat us out of our lands; whisky for tent-making."
"No, Waubeno. There was an old grandmother there, a sick woman, and a little coffin. This is a sad world sometimes. I pity everybody, and I would that all men were brothers. Go, look into the wagon, Waubeno."
The Indian went, and soon returned.
"Do you pity them, Waubeno?"
"Yes; but—"
"What, Waubeno?"
"I pity the Indian mother too. Your people drove her from her corn-fields at Rock Island, and she left the graves of her children behind her."
There was a shadow of sadness in the hearts of the Lincoln family as they turned away forever from the grave of Nancy Lincoln under the trees. The poor woman who rested there in the spot soon to be obliterated, little thought on her dying bed that the little boy she was leaving to poverty and adventure would be one day ranked with great men of the ages—with Servius Tullius, Pericles, Cincinnatus, Cromwell, Hampden, Washington, and Bolivar; that he would sit in the seat of a long line of illustrious Presidents, call a million men to arms, or that his rude family features would find a place among the grand statues of every liberated country on earth.