“I don’t see how he could get much comfort out of what they taught about her dyin’, sayin’ it was God’s will, and hintin’ that if you’d been what you ought to be it wouldn’t have happened, never told a man that if he let a woman work herself to death it was his doin’s she died--not God’s will at all--God’s will she should live and be happy and make him happy. “But I must say Mr. Lincoln had luck in the step-mother he got. If there ever was a good woman, it was Sarah Johnston, and she certain did her duty by Tom Lincoln’s children. ’Twa’n’t so easy either, poor as he was, the kind that never really got a hold on anything. Sarah Johnston did her part--teachin’ Mr. Lincoln just as his own mother would, and just as anxious as she’d been to have him grow up a good man. I tell you she was proud of him when he got to be President. I remember seein’ her back in ’62 or ’3 on the farm Mr. Lincoln gave her, little ways out of Charleston. One of the last things Mr. Lincoln did before he went to Washington was to go down there and see his step-mother. He knew better than anybody what she’d done for him. “Yes, sir, the best religious teachin’ Mr. Lincoln ever got was from Tom Lincoln’s two wives. It was the kind that went deep and stuck, because he saw ’em livin’ it every day, practicin’ it on him and his sister and his father and the neighbors. Whatever else he might have seen and learnt, when he was a boy he knew what his two mothers thought religion meant, and he never got away from that. “Of course he had other teachin’, principally what he got from the preachers that came around, now and then. Ramblin’ lot they was, men all het up over the sins of the world, and bent on doin’ their part towards headin’ off people from hell-fire. They traveled around alone, sometimes on horseback, sometimes afoot--poor as Job, not too much to wear or to eat, never thinkin’ of themselves, only about savin’ souls; and it was natural that bein’ alone so much, seein’ so much misery and so much wickedness, for there was lots that was bad in that part of the world in them times--natural enough meditatin’ as they did that they preached pretty strong doctrine. Didn’t have a chance often at a congregation, and felt they must scare it to repentance if they couldn’t do no other way. They’d work up people ’til they got ’em to shoutin’ for mercy. “I don’t suppose they ever had anybody that listened better to ’em than Mr. Lincoln. I can just see him watchin’ ’em and tryin’ to understand what they meant. He was curious, rolled things over, kept at ’em and no amount of excitement they stirred up would ever have upset him. No, he wa’n’t that kind.