The next witness is Lincoln's cousin, Dennis Hanks. Mr. Hanks held "the pulpy, red, little Lincoln" in his arms before he was "twenty-four hours old," and remained his constant companion during all the years that he lived in Kentucky and Indiana. He lived a part of the time in the Lincoln family, and married one of Lincoln's step-sisters. I met him recently at Charleston, Ill. With evident delight he rehearsed the story of Lincoln's boyhood, and reaffirmed the truthfulness of the following statements attributed to him by Lincoln's biographers: "Abe wasn't in early life a religious man. He was a moral man strictly.... In after life he became more religious; but the Bible puzzled him, especially the miracles" (Every-Day Life of Lincoln, p. 54). "'Religious songs did not appear to suit him at all,' says Dennis Hanks; but of profane ballads and amorous ditties he knew the words of a vast number. "Another was: 'Hail Columbia, happy land! If you ain't drunk, I'll be damned,' a song which Dennis thinks should be warbled only in the 'fields;' and tells us they knew and enjoyed all such songs as this'" (Lamon's Life of Lincoln, pp. 58, 59). The fitness of the above coarse travesty to be warbled, even in the fields, may well be doubted. Lamon would hardly have recorded it, and I certainly should not quote it, but for the fact that it strikingly illustrates one phase of Lincoln's "youthful piety." Among the many Christian hymns which Lincoln parodied, Mr. Hanks recalls the following: "How tedious and tasteless the hours." "When I can read my title clear." "Oh! to grace how great a debtor!" "Come, thou fount of every blessing." MRS. MATILDA MOORE. Lincoln's first husband was named Johnston. By him she had three children, a son and two daughters. The latter, like their mother, developed into noble specimens of womanhood; and both loved Lincoln as tenderly as though he had been their own brother. The elder was married to Dennis Hanks; the younger, Matilda, married Lincoln's cousin, Levi Hall, and, after his death, a gentleman named Moore. Lamon says that Lincoln in his youth made a mockery of the popular religion; not from any lack of reverence for what he believed to be good, but because "he thought that a person had better be without it." That he was accustomed to turn so-called sacred subjects into ridicule is attested by his stepsister, Mrs. Moore. She says: "When father and mother would go to church, Abe would take down the Bible, read a verse, give out a hymn, and we would sing. Abe was about fifteen years of age. He preached and we would do the crying" (Every-Day Life of Lincoln, p. 71). JOHN HALL.