his own part in that old life he spoke reluctantly and sadly.
Nevertheless there was once extracted from him an awkward
autobiographical fragment, and his friends have collected and recorded
concerning his earlier years quite as much as is common in great men's
biographies or can as a rule be reproduced with its true associations.
Thus there are tales enough of the untaught student's perseverance, and
of the boy giant's gentleness and prowess; tales, too, more than enough
in proportion, of the fun which varied but did not pervade his
existence, and of the young rustic's occasional and somewhat oafish
pranks. But, in any conception we may form as to the growth of his
mind and character, this fact must have its place, that to the man
himself the thought of his early life was unattractive, void of
self-content over the difficulties which he had conquered, and void of
romantic fondness for vanished joys of youth.

Much the same may be said of his ancestry and family connections.
Contempt for lowly beginnings, abhorrent as it is to any honest mind,
would to Lincoln's mind have probably been inconceivable, but he lacked
that interest in ancestry which is generally marked in his countrymen,
and from talk of his nearer progenitors he seems to have shrunk with a
positive sadness of which some causes will soon be apparent. Since his
death it has been ascertained that in 1638 one Samuel Lincoln of
Norwich emigrated to Massachusetts. Descent from him could be claimed
by a prosperous family in Virginia, several of whom fought on the
Southern side in the Civil War. One Abraham Lincoln, grandfather of
the President and apparently a grandson of Samuel, crossed the
mountains from Virginia in 1780 and settled his family in Kentucky, of
which the nearer portions had recently been explored. One morning four
years later he was at work near his cabin with Mordecai, Josiah, and
Thomas, his sons, when a shot from the bushes near by brought him down.