the wealthiest
of whom suffered greater privations than the poorest laboring man has to
endure to-day.

After his nomination to the presidency, Mr. Lincoln gave to Mr. Hicks, a
portrait painter, this memorandum of his birth:

"I was born February 12, 1809, in then Hardin
County, Kentucky, at a point within the now
county of Larue, a mile or a mile and a half
from where Hodgen's mill now is. My parents
being dead, and my memory not serving, I know
no means of identifying the precise locality.
It was on Nolen Creek.

"A. LINCOLN.
"JUNE 14, 1860."

The exact spot was identified after his death, and the house was found
standing many years later. The logs were removed to Chicago, for the
World's Columbian Exposition, in 1893, and the cabin was reconstructed
and exhibited there and elsewhere in the United States. The materials
were taken back to their original site, and a fine marble structure now
encloses the precious relics of the birthplace of "the first American,"
as Lowell calls Lincoln in his great "Commemoration Ode."

Cousin Dennis Hanks gives the following quaint description of "Nancy's
boy baby," as reported by Mrs. Eleanor Atkinson in her little book on
"Lincoln's Boyhood."

"Tom an' Nancy lived on a farm about two miles from us, when Abe was
born. I ricollect Tom comin' over to our house one cold mornin' in
Feb'uary an' sayin' kind o' slow, 'Nancy's got a boy baby.'

"Mother got flustered an' hurried up 'er work to go over to look after
the little feller, but I didn't have nothin' to wait fur, so I cut an'
run the hull two mile to see my new cousin.

"You bet I was tickled to death. Babies wasn't as common as blackberries
in the woods o' Kaintucky. Mother come over an' washed him an' put a
yaller flannel petticoat on him, an' cooked some dried berries with wild
honey fur Nancy, an' slicked things up an' went home. An' that's all the
nuss'n either of 'em got.

"I rolled up in a b'ar skin an' slep' by the fireplace that night, so's
I could see the little feller when he cried an' Tom had to get up an'
tend to him. Nancy let me hold him purty soon. Folks often ask me if Abe
was a good lookin' baby. Well, now, he looked just like any other baby,
at fust--like red cherry pulp squeezed dry. An' he didn't improve none
as he growed older. Abe never was much fur looks. I ricollect how Tom
joked about