ceremonies and jests of more than Rabelaisian crudeness; and a noisy
dispersal next day."(3) The intensities of the forest survived in hard
drinking, in the fury of the fun-making, and in the hunt. The forest
passion for storytelling had in no way decreased.

In this atmosphere, about eighteen and nineteen, Abraham shot up
suddenly from a slender boy to a huge, raw-honed, ungainly man, six feet
four inches tall, of unusual muscular strength. His strength was one of
the fixed conditions of his development. It delivered him from all fear
of his fellows. He had plenty of peculiarities. He was ugly, awkward;
he lacked the wanton appetites of the average sensual man. And these
peculiarities without his great strength as his warrant might have
brought him into ridicule. As it was, whatever his peculiarities, in
a society like that of Pigeon Creek, the man who could beat all
competitors, wrestling or boxing, was free from molestation. But Lincoln
instinctively had another aim in life than mere freedom to be himself.
Two characteristics that were so significant in his childhood continued
with growing vitality in his young manhood: his placidity and his
intense sense of comradeship. The latter, however, had undergone a
change. It was no longer the comradeship of the wild creatures. That
spurt of physical expansion, the swift rank growth to his tremendous
stature, swept him apparently across a dim dividing line, out of the
world of birds and beasts and into the world of men. He took the new
world with the same unfailing but also unexcitable curiosity with which
he had taken the other, the world of squirrels, flowers, fawns.

Here as there, the difference from his mother, deep though their
similarities may have been, was sharply evident. Had he been wholly at
one with her religiously, the gift of telling speech which he now began
to display might have led him into a course that would have rejoiced