Part 29 (2/2)

and I don't see what good he would do. But if Abraham says so, he will have to go.”

”How is Abraham?” asked Jasper.

”Oh, he is well, and as good to me as ever, and he studies hard, just as he used to do.”

”And is as lazy as ever,” said Thomas Lincoln. ”At the lazy folks' fair he'd take the premium.”

”You shouldn't say that,” said Mrs. Lincoln. ”Just think how good he was to everybody during the sickness! He never thought of himself, but just worked night and day. His own mother died of the same sickness years ago, and he's had a feelin' heart for the sufferers in this calamity. I tell you, elder, that he's good to everybody, and if he does not take hold to work in the way that father does, his head and heart are never idle. I am sorry that he and father do not see more alike. The boy is goin' to do well in the world. He begins right.”

When Abraham returned, there was one heart that was indeed glad to see him. It was the little dog. The animal bounded heels over head as soon as he heard the boy's step, and almost leaped upon his tall shoulder as he met him.

”Humph!” said Mr. Lincoln.

”Animals know who are good to them,” said 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sing 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, Was.h.i.+ngton, and Bolivar; that he would sit in the seat of a long line of ill.u.s.trious 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 knew her had felt the warmth of her kindness and marked her sadness. She was an intellectual woman, was deeply religious, and is believed to have been a very emotional character in the old Methodist camp-meetings. Her family, the Hankses, were among the best singers and loudest shouters at the camp-meetings, and she was in sympathy with them.

Her heart lived on in Abraham. When she fell sick of the epidemic fever, Abraham, then a boy of ten years of age, waited upon her and nursed her. There was no doctor within twenty-five miles. She was so slender, and had been so ill-sustained that the fever-fires did their work in a week. Finding her end near, she called Abraham and his little sister to her, and said:

”Be good to one another.”

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