streams instead of streets during the rains, a stench of pig-sties at
the back of its cabins, but everywhere looking outward glimpses of a
lovely meadow land.

At Elizabethtown in 1806 lived Joseph Hanks, a carpenter, also his niece
Nancy Hanks. Poor people they were, of the sort that had been sucked
into the forest in their weakness, or had been pushed into it by a
social pressure they could not resist; not the sort that had grimly
adventured its perils or gaily courted its lure. Their source was
Virginia. They were of a thriftless, unstable class; that vagrant
peasantry which had drifted westward to avoid competition with slave
labor. The niece, Nancy, has been reputed illegitimate. And though
tradition derives her from the predatory amour of an aristocrat, there
is nothing to sustain the tale except her own appearance. She had a
bearing, a cast of feature, a tone, that seemed to hint at higher social
origins than those of her Hanks relatives. She had a little schooling;
was of a pious and emotional turn of mind; enjoyed those amazing
"revivals" which now and then gave an outlet to the pent-up religiosity
of the village; and she was almost handsome.(1)

History has preserved no clue why this girl who was rather the best of
her sort chose to marry an illiterate apprentice of her uncle's, Thomas
Lincoln, whose name in the forest was spelled "Linkhorn." He was a
shiftless fellow, never succeeding at anything, who could neither read
nor write. At the time of his birth, twenty-eight years before, his
parents--drifting, roaming people, struggling with poverty--were
dwellers in the Virginia mountains. As a mere lad, he had shot an
Indian--one of the few positive acts attributed to him--and his father
had been killed by Indians. There was a "vague tradition" that his
grandfather had been a Pennsylvania Quaker who had wandered southward