through the forest mountains. The tradition angered him. Though he
appears to have had little enough--at least in later years--of the
fierce independence of the forest, he resented a Quaker ancestry as an
insult. He had no suspicion that in after years the zeal of genealogists
would track his descent until they had linked him with a lost member of
a distinguished Puritan family, a certain Mordecai Lincoln who removed
to New Jersey, whose descendants became wanderers of the forest and sank
speedily to the bottom of the social scale, retaining not the slightest
memory of their New England origin.(2) Even in the worst of the
forest villages, few couples started married life in less auspicious
circumstances than did Nancy and Thomas. Their home in one of the alleys
of Elizabethtown was a shanty fourteen feet square.(3) Very soon after
marriage, shiftless Thomas gave up carpentering and took to farming.
Land could be had almost anywhere for almost nothing those days, and
Thomas got a farm on credit near where now stands Hodgenville. Today, it
is a famous place, for there, February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln, second
child, but first son of Nancy and Thomas, was born.(4)

During most of eight years, Abraham lived in Kentucky. His father,
always adrift in heart, tried two farms before abandoning Kentucky
altogether. A shadowy figure, this Thomas; the few memories of him
suggest a superstitious nature in a superstitious community. He used
to see visions in the forest. Once, it is said, he came home, all
excitement, to tell his wife he had seen a giant riding on a lion,
tearing up trees by the roots; and thereupon, he took to his bed and
kept it for several days.

His son Abraham told this story of the giant on the lion to a playmate
of his, and the two boys gravely discussed the existence of ghosts.
Abraham thought his father "didn't exactly believe in them," and seems