Nancy Lincoln died, and she too was buried on the knoll under the shadows of the forest. About a score of people attended the funeral, but there was no minister present to conduct the simple ceremonies. A few months later a traveling preacher named David Elkin preached a funeral sermon, but to this day there is no stone to mark the last resting-place of the body of Nancy Lincoln. The simple fact requires no word of comment or interpretation.

The log-house was now no longer a hospital; it was only a desolate and lonely place where Tom Lincoln and his two children and Dennis Hanks could stay and learn all the remaining lessons of utter poverty in the backwoods.

Abe was learning lessons very fast, and more shadows were gathering upon his boyish face.

The change in the manner of housekeeping or in the amount of it was not so great as it might have been in another home than that, and the children could get along after a fashion without any mother. Poor Nancy Lincoln had followed her shiftless husband into the woods, only to die of the mysterious pestilence and to be buried, and soon and altogether forgotten.

Utter Desolation—Arrival of a Good Angel—A Ray of Civilization—1819.

THERE are many things which cannot be done by a tenyear-old boy, a girl of twelve, and a middle-aged backwoodsman. There were no new clothes made that winter for Nancy Lincoln's motherless children, and Tom shifted for his own apparel as best he could.

The spring, the summer, and the autumn of the year 1819 went slowly by. The log-house grew more dirty and more desolate, and Abe and his sister and Dennis Hanks became more and more like a trio of unwashed, uncared-for, and halfnaked young savages. It did not seem so much of a hardship during the warmer weather, and there was only now and then a passer-by to make unkind remarks upon the condition of things; but the storms and frosts of winter were surely coming.

Even Tom Lincoln at last awoke to a consciousness that something must be done, and about the first of November the young folk had the cabin all to themselves. Whether or not they knew the nature of Tom's errand to Kentucky, they were left to do their own housekeeping.

There was corn enough and bacon, and some kinds of small fresh meat could be obtained from the woods by a fair degree of boyish industry. Wood was to be had for the chopping, and they need not freeze; and there were the cabins of neighbors to go to now in any dire extremity. Still the hunting of game over frozen ground, and the chopping of logs in the snow, was chilly work for barefooted boys; and the next four weeks

were hard ones, in the course of training through which little Abe was preparing for the unknown trials before him.

The weeks went by, and the snow fell, and the storms whistled through the woods and blew drearily in through the open door and windows of the cabin; but the children made the best of it.

There came an afternoon in December when a great shout reached their ears from the edge of the clearing. It was Tom Lincoln's voice, and the young housekeepers went out to see.

He had returned, and he had come with a team of four horses and a lumber-wagon laden with some kind of property. There had plainly been a miracle of some sort. It was very nearly one, for Tom had persuaded a respectable widow woman, Mrs. Sally Johnston, of Elizabethtown, Kentucky, to marry him and come to live in his Indiana "home." Her maiden name had been Bush, and before her first marriage Tom had admired her and proposed and been rejected. His present suit had been more successful, and she had only waited so long in order to close up her affairs in Kentucky. The four-horse team was the property of Tom's brother-in-law, Ralph Krume, who had been hired to convey the bride and her household goods to their new abiding-place.

Their new mother was no stranger to Abe and his sister. She had even exhibited an especial liking for Abe in days gone by, and she had now been sent into the wilderness for his benefit as much as for that of his father.

She brought with her a son and two daughters of her own,John, Sarah, and Matilda,—and with them what to the eyes of her step-children was something like splendor. The wagon contained a fine bureau, a table, a set of chairs, a large clotheschest, cooking-utensils, knives, forks, bedding, and other articles, the like of which had never before been carried under any roof of Tom Lincoln's.

Mrs. Sally Johnston had been a woman of respectable family and much personal pride, and had been led to expect some

thing very different from the manifest poverty and squalor now before her eyes. She had been told of a house and a farm, and here they were indeed; but she was Mrs. Lincoln now, and she did not flinch for a moment from the new duties she had undertaken. It was a good deal to the comfortless little ones of poor Nancy Hanks Lincoln that her place should be taken by an old neighbor and a kind one, but they little knew what a blessing had really come to them. Shy, awkward, conscious of the shocking contrast between their own personal appearance and that of the neatly clad children of their new mother, Abe and Sally could hardly offer the new-comers much of a welcome.

It may well be Mrs. Lincoln was aided by the sight of those forlorn little folk in smothering any expression of her disappointment and indignation.

The mute appeal of their misery went to her kind heart overpoweringly. She saw at once that she had a work to do,. but there was no prophet to tell her how vast were to be the consequences of that work-that is, of the part of it which stood there in the snow, upheld by the bare, frost-cracked feet of that dirty, ragged ten-years boy with so shy, sad, sensitive a face, trying to smile at her from under his shaggy mop of tangled hair. She told the story of her feelings, years afterwards, with her own lips.

"The poor things!" she exclaimed, as she looked at them. "I'll make 'em look a little more human."

The contents of the wagon were transferred to the one room of the cabin, and Mrs. Lincoln's good work began. She had been a stirring, energetic, self-helpful woman all her life, and she took hold of Tom's house after a fashion that gave him plenty of work to do. She made him lay a substantial wooden floor over the old one of pounded dirt. She insisted upon having a good door that swung on hinges, and sashes with glass in the hitherto vacant window-holes. Tom was forced to trim up every corner of the house, inside and out, into something like order and decency; and when this was done and the

new furniture was put in place, there was an air of home about it all that had never been there before.

Mrs. Lincoln had brought with her a good store of clothing for her own children, and now she showed no sign of partiality in its distribution. As soon as Abe and Dennis and Sally had undergone the novel sensation of a thorough washing, they were made to know the greater strangeness of being well and warmly clad, and of wearing shoes and stockings in cold weather. No backwoods children, in those days, would have dreamed of any such luxury without a hard frost for an

excuse.

It was yet another novelty to have good beds under them, and to lie warm through all the bitter nights, and to feel that the winter was forcibly shut out from pinching them. That was the first shut door they had slept behind for many a long cold night and day.

Abraham Lincoln had received a new mother, and wonderful matters with her. He had suddenly stepped out of misery into a new life. He was clean and clothed and comfortable and well fed, with such a home as he had never known before. Another and a greater thing came dawning in upon the darkness of his stunted life, for he had found some one whom he could love with all his heart, and love her he did, and he was well assured of her love for him. To the end of his life, she was the "mother" to whom his memories went back, although beyond her, in an earlier and darker hour of his morning-time, was the form of his first, his own mother. God is very merciful to children as to all their early troubles and bereavements; and little Abe had been without any mother at all for nearly a and a half when his father returned from that most profitable trip to Kentucky.

year

Dennis Hanks and Sally Lincoln shared fairly in all the benefits bestowed. But the latter was never called Nancy any more. Although now there were three of the same name in the united family, Sally she remained to the day of her death.