Sarah Bush Lincoln, his stepmother, was good to him and he to her.
Above all she encouraged him in his early studies, to which a fretful
housewife could have opposed such terrible obstacles. She lived to
hope that he might not be elected President for fear that enemies
should kill him, and she lived to have her fear fulfilled. His
affectionate care over her continued to the end. She lived latterly
with her son John Johnston. Abraham's later letters to this companion
of his youth deserve to be looked up in the eight large volumes called
his Works, for it is hard to see how a man could speak or act better to
an impecunious friend who would not face his own troubles squarely. It
is sad that the "ever your affectionate brother" of the earlier letters
declines to "yours sincerely" in the last; but it is an honest decline
of affection, for the man had proved to be cheating his mother, and
Abraham had had to stop it.

Two of the cousinhood, Dennis Hanks, a character of comedy, and John
Hanks, the serious and steady character of the connection, deserve
mention. They and John Johnston make momentary reappearances again.
Otherwise the whole of Abraham Lincoln's kindred are now out of the
story. They have been disposed of thus hastily at the outset, not
because they were discreditable or slight people, but because Lincoln
himself when he began to find his footing in the world seems to have
felt sadly that his family was just so much to him and no more. The
dearest of his recollections attached to premature death; the next to
chronic failure. Rightly or wrongly (and we know enough about heredity
now to expect any guess as to its working in a particular case to be
wrong) he attributed the best that he had inherited to a licentious
connection and a nameless progenitor. Quite early he must have been
intensely ambitious, and discovered in himself intellectual power; but