comprised only one room, one window, and a door.

[Illustration: Lincoln's Boyhood Home in Kentucky.]

Here they lived for a little more than four years, when the father
removed to another farm about fifteen miles further to the northeast.

The occasion of this removal and of the subsequent one, two or three
years later, was undoubtedly the uncertainty of land titles in Kentucky
in that day. This "roving disposition" cannot fairly be charged to
shiftlessness. In spite of the extraordinary disadvantages of Thomas
Lincoln's early life, he lived as well as his neighbors, though that
was humble enough, and accumulated a small amount of property in spite
of the low rate of compensation.

In the year 1816 Thomas determined to migrate to Indiana. He sold out
his farm, receiving for it the equivalent of $300. Of this sum, $20 was
in cash and the rest was in whisky--ten barrels--which passed as a kind
of currency in that day. He then loaded the bulk of his goods upon a
flat boat, floating down the stream called Rolling Fork into Salt
Creek, thence into the Ohio River, in fact, to the bottom of that
river. The watercourse was obstructed with stumps and snags of divers
sorts, and especially with "sawyers," or trees in the river which,
forced by the current, make an up-and-down motion like that of a man
sawing wood.

The flat boat became entangled in these obstructions and was upset, and
the cargo went to the bottom. By dint of great labor much of this was
rescued and the travelers pushed on as far as Thompson's Ferry in Perry
County, Indiana. There the cargo was left in the charge of friends, and