y. They have been disposed of thus hastily at the outset, not
because they were discreditable or slight people, but because Lincoln
himself when he began to find his footing in the world seems to have
felt sadly that his family was just so much to him and no more. The
dearest of his recollections attached to premature death; the next to
chronic failure. Rightly or wrongly (and we know enough about heredity
now to expect any guess as to its working in a particular case to be
wrong) he attributed the best that he had inherited to a licentious
connection and a nameless progenitor. Quite early he must have been
intensely ambitious, and discovered in himself intellectual power; but
from his twelfth year to his twenty-first there was hardly a soul to
comprehend that side of him. This chill upon his memory unmistakably
influenced the particular complexion of his melancholy. Unmistakably
too he early learnt to think that he was odd, that his oddity was
connected with his strength, that he might be destined to stand alone
and capable of so standing.

The life of the farming pioneer in what was then the Far West afforded
a fair prospect of laborious independence. But at least till Lincoln
was grown up, when a time of rapid growth and change set in, it offered
no hope of quickly gotten wealth, and it imposed severe hardship on
all. The country was thickly wooded; the settler had before him at the
outset heavy toil in clearing the ground and in building some rude
shelter,--a house or just a "half-faced camp," that is, a shed with one
side open to the weather such as that in which the Lincoln family
passed their first winter near Gentryville. The site once chosen and
the clearing once made, there was no such ease of cultivation or such
certain fertility as later settlers found yet further west when the
development of railways, of agricultural machinery, and of Eastern or
European markets had opened out to cultivation the enormous stretches
of level grass plain beyond the Mississippi.

Till population had grown a good deal, pioneer families were largely
occupied in producing for themselves with their own hands what, in
their hardy if not always frugal view, were the necessities and
comforts of life. They had no Eastern market for their produce, for
railways did not begin to be made till 1840, and it was many years
before they crossed the Eastern mountains. An occasional cargo was
taken on a flat-bottomed boat down the nea