“Not at all at present. There are no doors or windows. There is not even a plank floor.”
“We have got along without them,” said her husband.
“We can’t get along without them any longer. You are a carpenter, and can easily provide them. I will put in my furniture, and after awhile we will have things more comfortable.”
“I don’t think we need the bureau. You say it cost forty dollars. You had better sell it. It is sinful extravagance to have so much money in furniture.”
“I can’t consent to that,” said Mrs. Lincoln decidedly. “I have nothing that is too good for us. I will see that you and the children live more comfortably in future.”
Abe and Nancy looked on with interest while the bureau and the other possessions of their new mother were taken from the wagon by their father and their uncle Ralph. They began to think they were going to live in city style. In particular they admired the bureau which had cost forty dollars. Why, their cabin had not cost that. They felt something like the country minister of sixty years since, to whom his parishioners presented a carpet for the “fore room.” When it was spread on the floor, he gazed at it admiringly and ejaculated, “What, all this and heaven too! This is too much!”
Mrs. Lincoln was quite in earnest, and set her husband to work the next day at the improvements she had specified. When after a time they were completed; when the earthen floor was succeeded by one of boards; when two windows had been set in the sides of the cabin, and a door closed up the entrance; when the primitive bed and bedstead had been superseded by the newcomer’s comfortable bedstead and bedding, and the three-legged stools had been removed to give place to chairs, the three children were very happy.
And indeed it was a happy day for Thomas Lincoln and his young family when his second wife took charge of his household. She was kind-hearted and energetic, and though she had three children of her own, she was never found wanting in care or affection for her husband’s children. She took a special interest in young Abe. She read him better than his father, and saw that there was that in him which it would pay to develop.
To begin with, she rigged him out in new clothes. His ragged condition had excited her sympathy, and she rightly judged that neat attire helps a boy’s or girl’s self-respect. I have no doubt that Abe, though he never had a weakness for fine clothes, surveyed himself complacently when for the first time he saw himself respectably dressed.
This is the description of Abe’s step-mother given many years after by Mrs. Chapman, the daughter of Dennis Hanks: