Produced by Heather Clark, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) Boys' and Girls' Biography of Abraham Lincoln. By James H. Shaw. Evergreen City Publishing Company, Bloomington, Illinois. TYPOGRAPHY AND PRESSWORK BY EARL MARQUAM, BLOOMINGTON, ILLINOIS. [Illustration] Boys' and Girls' Biography of Abraham Lincoln. CHAPTER I. A great English writer[1] in a lecture on America and the Americans said that when an American gets to heaven he will not be satisfied unless he can move farther west. [Footnote 1: Charles Dickens.] He said this because it has been so much the custom of our people to "move West." It is not so common now as it was a few years ago because the great public lands, free to those who would settle on them or plant trees, are mostly occupied. The Lincoln family a couple of hundred years ago first "moved west" from England to Massachusetts; then they moved west again to Pennsylvania; then west and south to Virginia; then west again to Kentucky. Way back in the last century a man was digging in the rich soil of Kentucky. He turned up clods, planted seed and God sent the rain-drops and sun-beams and the grain sprang up and became gold. The surest gold mine in the world is our fertile soil and the surest miner is our farmer. "Whoever plants a seed beneath the sod And waits to see it push away the clod He trusts in God." A little boy watched his father work and learned the lesson that man lives best by the sweat of his own brow, not by the sweat of other men's brows. While they toiled, through the shadows of the surrounding forest a savage stole secretly toward them on his soft moccasins. He paused, aimed his gun and fired. The man fell over dead; then the Indian came rapidly, caught up the boy and ran off toward the woods with him. But his older brother, Mordecai, ran to the log hut and catching up the ever ready gun shot the Indian through the heart and sent him to the "happy hunting ground," and saved little Thomas Lincoln, who grew up to be a man and became the father of our beloved martyr president, Abraham Lincoln. You have no doubt read of the adventures of Daniel Boone and the pioneers of Kentucky. A little boy thought these pioneers were so grand he said he wanted to be a "pioneer" when he went to heaven. But these pioneers had many hardships we do not have. They were constantly fighting the Indians and did not have the pleasant homes we have, but lived in rough log cabins, without plaster on the walls and with only the earth for floors. The snow drifted through the cracks of the logs and sometimes the children would wake up in the morning and find a little drift of snow on top of the bed quilt.