was of a peaceable and inoffensive temper, but on great provocation
would turn on a bully with surprising and dire consequences. Old
Thomas, after Abraham was turned loose, continued a migrant, always
towards a supposed better farm further west, always with a mortgage on
him. Abraham, when he was a struggling professional man, helped him
with money as well as he could. We have his letter to the old man on
his death-bed, a letter of genuine but mild affection with due words of
piety. He explains that illness in his own household makes it
impossible for him to pay a last visit to his father, and then, with
that curious directness which is common in the families of the poor and
has as a rule no sting, he remarks that an interview, if it had been
possible, might have given more pain than pleasure to both. Everybody
has insisted from the first how little Abraham took after his father,
but more than one of the traits attributed to Thomas will certainly
reappear.

Abraham, as a man, when for once he spoke of his mother, whom he very
seldom mentioned, spoke with intense feeling for her motherly care. "I
owe," he said, "everything that I am to her." It pleased him in this
talk to explain by inheritance from her the mental qualities which
distinguished him from the house of Lincoln, and from others of the
house of Hanks. She was, he said, the illegitimate daughter of a
Virginian gentleman, whose name he did not know, but from whom as he
guessed the peculiar gifts, of which he could not fail to be conscious,
were derived.

Sarah his sister was married at Gentryville to one Mr. Grigsby. The
Grigsbys were rather great people, as people went in Gentryville. It
is said to have become fixed in the boy's mind that the Grigsbys had
not treated Sarah well; and this was the beginning of certain woes.