Mrs. Lincoln. "Abraham, here
is the preacher."

How tall, and dark, and droll, and yet how sad, the boy looked! He was
full grown now, uncouth and ungainly. Who but Jasper would have seen
behind the features of that young, sinewy backwoodsman the soul of the
leader and liberator?

It was a busy time with the Lincolns. Their goods were loaded upon a
rude and very heavy ox-wagon, and the oxen were given into the charge of
young Abraham to drive.

The young man's voice might have been heard a mile as he swung his whip
and called out to the oxen on starting. They passed by the grave under
the great trees where his poor mother's body lay and left it there,
never to be visited again. There were some thirteen persons in the
emigrant party.

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.

Poor Nancy Hanks! Every one who kn