a last visit to his father, and then, with
that curious directness which is common in the families of the poor and
has as a rule no sting, he remarks that an interview, if it had been
possible, might have given more pain than pleasure to both. Everybody
has insisted from the first how little Abraham took after his father,
but more than one of the traits attributed to Thomas will certainly
reappear.

Abraham, as a man, when for once he spoke of his mother, whom he very
seldom mentioned, spoke with intense feeling for her motherly care. "I
owe," he said, "everything that I am to her." It pleased him in this
talk to explain by inheritance from her the mental qualities which
distinguished him from the house of Lincoln, and from others of the
house of Hanks. She was, he said, the illegitimate daughter of a
Virginian gentleman, whose name he did not know, but from whom as he
guessed the peculiar gifts, of which he could not fail to be conscious,
were derived.

Sarah his sister was married at Gentryville to one Mr. Grigsby. The
Grigsbys were rather great people, as people went in Gentryville. It
is said to have become fixed in the boy's mind that the Grigsbys had
not treated Sarah well; and this was the beginning of certain woes.

Sarah Bush Lincoln, his stepmother, was good to him and he to her.
Above all she encouraged him in his early studies, to which a fretful
housewife could have opposed such terrible obstacles. She lived to
hope that he might not be elected President for fear that enemies
should kill him, and she lived to have her fear fulfilled. His
affectionate care over her continued to the end. She lived latterly
with her son John Johnston. Abraham's later letters to this companion
of his youth deserve to be looked up in the eight large volumes called
his Works, for it is hard to see how a man could speak or act better to
an impecunious friend who would not face his own troubles squarely. It
is sad that the "ever your affectionate brother" of the earlier letters
declines to "yours sincerely" in the last; but it is an honest decline
of affection, for the man had proved to be cheating his mother, and
Abraham had had to stop it.

Two of the cousinhood, Dennis Hanks, a character of comedy, and John
Hanks, the serious and steady character of the connection, deserve
mention. They and John Johnston make momentary reappearances again.
Otherwise the whole of Abraham Lincoln's kindred are now out of the
stor