England (we might hope for the purpose of genealogical harmony that the
county was Lincolnshire) to Hingham in Massachusetts, and by way of
Pennsylvania and Virginia to Kentucky. The grandfather of our Abraham
was killed, while working in his field on the Kentucky farm, by
predatory Indians shooting from the cover of the dense forest. Abraham's
father, Thomas, at that time a boy, was working in the field where his
father was murdered. Such an incident in Kentucky simply repeated what
had been going on just a century before in Massachusetts, at Deerfield
and at dozens of other settlements on the edge of the great forest which
was the home of the Indians. During the hundred years, the frontier of
the white man's domain had been moved a thousand miles to the south-west
and, as ever, there was still friction at the point of contact.

The record of the boyhood of our Lincoln has been told in dozens of
forms and in hundreds of monographs. We know of the simplicity, of the
penury, of the family life in the little one-roomed log hut that formed
the home for the first ten years of Abraham's life. We know of his
little group of books collected with toil and self-sacrifice. The
series, after some years of strenuous labour, comprised the Bible,
_Aesop's Fables_, a tattered copy of Euclid's _Geometry_, and Weems's
_Life of Washington_. The _Euclid_ he had secured as a great prize from
the son of a neighbouring farmer. Abraham had asked the boy the meaning
of the word "demonstrate." His friend said that he did not himself know,
but that he knew the word was in a book which he had at school, and he
hunted up the _Euclid_. After some bargaining, the _Euclid_ came into
Abraham's possession. In accordance with his practice, the whole
contents were learned by heart. Abraham's later opponents at the Bar or
in political discussion came to realise that he understood the meaning
of the word "demonstrate." In fact, references to specific problems of
Euclid occurred in some of his earlier speeches at the Bar.