Thomas Lincoln either failed to earn sufficient money to meet his household expenses or grew tired of his carpenter work, for, two years later, he left Elizabethtown and moved his family to his farm near Hodgensville, on the Big South Fork of Nolen Creek. It was a miserable place, of thin, unproductive soil and only partly cleared. Its only attraction was a fine spring of water, shaded by a little grove, which caused it to be called "Rock Spring Farm." The cabin was of the rudest sort, with a single room, a single window, a big fireplace, and a huge outside chimney. In this cabin Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, and here he spent the first four years of his childhood. It was a far reach to the White House. Soon after his nomination for the Presidency he furnished a brief autobiography to Mr. Hicks, an artist who was painting his portrait, in which he said,-- "I was born February 12, 1809, in then Hardin County, Kentucky, at a point within the now County of Larue, a mile or a mile and a half from where Hodgen's mill now is. My parents being dead, and my own memory not serving, I know no means of identifying the precise locality. It was on Nolen Creek. "A. LINCOLN. "June 14, 1860." The precise spot has since been clearly identified, and the cabin was still standing after his death. In 1813 the family removed to a more comfortable home on Knob Creek, six miles from Hodgensville, where Thomas Lincoln bought a better farm of two hundred and thirty-eight acres for one hundred and eighteen pounds and gave his note in payment. This was Abraham Lincoln's second home, and there he lived for four years. We know little about his childhood, except that it was of continual privation in a cheerless home, for Thomas Lincoln evidently found it difficult to supply his family with food and clothing. Mr. Lincoln seldom talked freely of those days, even to his most intimate friends, although from remarks which he dropped from time to time they judged that the impressions of his first years were indelible upon his temperament and contributed to his melancholy. On one occasion, being asked if he remembered anything about the War of 1812, he said that when a child, returning from fishing one day, he met a soldier in the road and, having been admonished by his mother that everybody should be good to the soldiers, he gave him his fish. [Illustration: Copyright, 1900, by McClure, Phillips & Co. THE BIRTHPLACE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN] Thomas and Nancy Lincoln had three children. Sarah, the eldest, at the age of fourteen married Aaron Griggsby and died in childbirth a year later. Thomas, the third child, died when only three days old.