The story of this wonderful man begins and ends with a tragedy,
for his grandfather, also named Abraham, was killed by a shot
from an Indian's rifle while peaceably at work with his three
sons on the edge of their frontier clearing. Eighty-one years
later the President himself met death by an assassin's bullet.
The murderer of one was a savage of the forest; the murderer of
the other that far more cruel thing, a savage of civilization.

When the Indian's shot laid the pioneer farmer low, his second
son, Josiah, ran to a neighboring fort for help, and Mordecai,
the eldest, hurried to the cabin for his rifle. Thomas, a child
of six years, was left alone beside the dead body of his father;
and as Mordecai snatched the gun from its resting-place over the
door of the cabin, he saw, to his horror, an Indian in his
war-paint, just stooping to seize the child. Taking quick aim at
a medal on the breast of the savage, he fired, and the Indian
fell dead. The little boy, thus released, ran to the house, where
Mordecai, firing through the loopholes, kept the Indians at bay
until help arrived from the fort.

It was this child Thomas who grew up to be the father of
President Abraham Lincoln. After the murder of his father the
fortunes of the little family grew rapidly worse, and doubtless
because of poverty, as well as by reason of the marriage of his
older brothers and sisters, their home was broken up, and Thomas
found himself, long before he was grown, a wandering laboring
boy. He lived for a time with an uncle as his hired servant, and
later he learned the trade of carpenter. He grew to manhood
entirely without education, and when he was twenty-eight years