Abraham Lincoln Author:William Osborn Stoddard Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. A NEW ELEMENT. Utter Desolation—Arrival of a Good Angel—A Ray of Civilization—1819. Thehe are many things which cannot be done by a ten- yea... more »r-old boy, a girl of twelve, and a middle-aged backwoodsman. There were no new clothes made that winter for Nancy Lincoln's motherless children, and Tom shifted for his own apparel as best he could. The spring, the smnmer, and the autumn of the year 1819 went slowly by. The log-house grew more dirty and more desolate, and Abe and his sister and Dennis Hanks became more and more like a trio of unwashed, uncared-for, and half- naked young savages. It did not seem so much of a hardship during the warmer weather, and there was only now and then a passer-by to make unkind remarks upon the condition of things; but the storms and frosts of winter were surely coming. Even Tom Lincoln at last awoke to a consciousness that something must be done, and about the first of November the young folk had the cabin all to themselves. Whether or not they knew the nature of Tom's errand to Kentucky, they were left to do their own housekeeping. There was corn enough and bacon, and some kinds of small fresh meat could be obtained from the woods by a fair degree of boyish industry. Wood was to be had for the chopping, and they need not freeze; and there were the cabins of neighbors to go to now in any dire extremity. Still the hunting of game over frozen ground, and the chopping of logs in the snow, was chilly work for barefooted boys; and the next four weekswere hard ones, in the course of training through which little Abe was preparing for the unknown trials before him. The weeks went by, and the snow fell, and the storms whistled through the woods and blew drearily in through the open door and windows of the cabin; but the children...« less