the Mississippi to New Orleans; but no return cargo could be brought up
stream. Knives and axes were the most precious objects to be gained by
trade; woollen fabrics were rare in the West, when Lincoln was born,
and the white man and woman, like the red whom they had displaced, were
chiefly dressed in deer skins. The woods abounded in game, and in the
early stages of the development of the West a man could largely support
himself by his gun. The cold of every winter is there great, and an
occasional winter made itself long remembered, like the "winter of the
deep snow" in Illinois, by the havoc of its sudden onset and the
suffering of its long duration. The settling of a forest country was
accompanied here as elsewhere by the occasional ravages of strange and
destructive pestilences and the constant presence of malaria.
Population was soon thick enough for occasional gatherings, convivial
or religious, and in either case apt to be wild, but for long it was
not thick enough for the life of most settlers to be other than lonely
as well as hard.

Abraham Lincoln in his teens grew very fast, and by nineteen he was
nearly six foot four. His weight was never quite proportionate to
this. His ungainly figure, with long arms and large hands and
relatively small development of chest, and the strange deep-cut
lineaments of his face were perhaps the evidence of unfit (sometimes
insufficient) food in these years of growth. But his muscular strength
was great, and startling statistical tales are told of the weight he
could lift and the force of his blows with a mallet or an axe. To a
gentle and thoughtful boy with secret ambition in him such strength is
a great gift, and in such surroundings most obviously so. Lincoln as a
lad was a valuable workman at the varied tasks that came his way,
without needing that intense application to manual pursuits which the
bent of his mind made irksome to him. And he was a person of high