LINCOLN’S FIRST HOME IN ILLINOIS.
After a photograph owned by H. E. Barker of Springfield, Illinois. A printed description accompanying the photograph says: “The above is an exact reproduction of a photograph taken in 1865 of Abraham Lincoln’s cabin on the banks of the Sangamon River. The cabin was located upon Section 28, Harristown Township, Macon County, Illinois.” The genuineness of the picture is attested by the Hon. Richard J. Oglesby, at that time Governor of Illinois.

EARLY SORROWS.

His life had its tragedies as well as its touch of romance—tragedies so real and profound that they gave dignity to all the crudeness and poverty which surrounded him, and quickened and intensified the melancholy temperament he had inherited from his mother. Away back in 1816, when Thomas Lincoln had started to find a farm in Indiana, bidding his wife be ready to go into the wilderness on his return, Nancy Lincoln had taken her boy and girl to a tiny grave, that of her youngest child; and the three had there said good-by to a little one whom the children had scarcely known, but for whom the mother’s grief was so keen that the boy never forgot the scene.

LINCOLN’S BROAD-AXE.
This broad-axe is said to have been owned originally by Abram Bales of New Salem; and, according to tradition, it was bought from him by Lincoln. After Lincoln forsook the woods, he sold the axe to one Mr. Irvin. Mr. L. W. Bishop of Petersburg now has the axe, having gotten it directly from Mr. Irvin. There are a number of affidavits attesting its genuineness. The axe has evidently seen hard usage, and is now covered with a thick coat of rust.

Two years later he saw his father make a green pine box and put his dead mother into it, and he saw her buried not far from their cabin, almost without prayer. Young as he was, it was his efforts, it is said, which brought a parson from Kentucky, three months later, to preach the sermon and conduct the service which seemed to the child a necessary honor to the dead.[[11]] As sad as the death of his mother was that of his only sister, Sarah. Married to Aaron Grigsby in 1826, she had died a year and a half later in child-birth, a death which to her brother must have seemed a horror and a mystery.

Apart from these family sorrows there was all the crime and misery of the community—all of which came to his ears and awakened his nature. He even saw in those days one of his companions go suddenly mad. The young man never recovered his reason, but sank into idiocy. All night he would croon plaintive songs, and Lincoln himself tells how, fascinated by this mysterious malady, he used to rise before daylight to cross the fields and listen to this funeral dirge of the reason. In spite of the poverty and rudeness of his life the depth of his nature was unclouded. He could feel intensely, and his imagination was quick to respond to the touch of mystery.

CHAPTER VII.
THE LINCOLNS LEAVE INDIANA.—THE JOURNEY TO ILLINOIS.—ABRAHAM LINCOLN STARTS OUT FOR HIMSELF.

In the spring of 1830, when Abraham was twenty-one years old, his father, Thomas Lincoln, decided to leave Indiana. The reason Dennis Hanks gives for this removal was a disease called the “milk-sick.” Abraham Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, and several of their relatives who had followed them from Kentucky had died of it. The cattle had been carried off by it. Neither brute nor human life seemed to be safe. As Dennis Hanks says: “This was reason enough (ain’t it?) for leaving.” Any one who has travelled through the portions of Spencer County in which the Lincolns settled will respect Thomas Lincoln for his energy in moving. When covered with timber, as the land was when he chose his farm, it no doubt promised well; but fourteen years of hard labor showed him that the soil was niggardly and the future of the country unpromising. To-day, sixty-five years since the Lincolns left Spencer County, the country remains as it was then, dull, commonplace, unfruitful. The towns show no signs of energy or prosperity. There are no leading streets or buildings; no man’s house is better than his neighbor’s, and every man’s house is ordinary. For a long distance on each side of Gentryville, as one passes by rail, no superior farm is to be seen, no prosperous mine or manufactory. It is a dead, monotonous country, where no possibilities of quick wealth have been discovered, and which only centuries of tilling and fertilizing can make prosperous. Thomas Lincoln did well to leave Indiana.