his neighbors. He was the great story-teller of the county, a character in much request on the frontier in the early days.
Some readers have doubtless visited the richly wooded parks of Germany, France, or England, where the game is carefully preserved, where droves of clean, glistening black pigs and great herds of deer are seen, and where, as you walk along, there is heard at every step the rustle of a startled hare, and where broods of partridges are following their mother in search of food, as tame as chickens. Now, it was as easy for the settler to subsist his family in this Indiana forest, as it would be for one of the huntsmen to live in a great park, if he could shoot as much game as he liked. Thomas Lincoln, therefore, being such a man as he was, destitute of ambition either for himself or his children, took life very easily, and any one acquainted with the family would have foretold for Abraham no higher destiny than that of a squatter on the frontier, or a flat-boat hand on the rivers.
A terrible and mysterious epidemic swept over that country, called the milk disease, one of the numerous maladies caused by the settlers' total disregard of sanitary conditions. One of the victims was Nancy Lincoln, the wife of Thomas and the mother of Abraham. The husband, who had been her only nurse and only physician, was now her undertaker also. He sawed and hammered some green boards into a long box. The few neighbors, about twenty in all, carried and followed her remains to a little eminence half a mile away, and there buried her in the virgin soil of the wilderness. There was no ceremony performed at her funeral, because there was no one competent to perform it. Some months after, when a roving preacher came along, Thomas Lincoln induced him to preach a funeral sermon for his wife, and thus this omission was made good.
