After a faded ambrotype of Mr. Lincoln, now in the Lincoln Monument collection at Springfield, Illinois. All that is known of it is that it was taken at Beardstown in 1858. Mr. Lincoln wore a linen coat on the occasion. The picture is regarded as a good likeness of him as he appeared during the Lincoln Douglas campaign. ] [Illustration: APPOINTMENT OF THOMAS LINCOLN AS ROAD SURVEYOR.—HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED. From a tracing made by Henry Whitney Cleveland. The original of this document is in the records of Hardin County, at Elizabethtown, Kentucky. It has hitherto been entirely overlooked by the biographers of Lincoln, and was discovered in the course of a search for documents instituted for this work. The appointment was made on May 13, 1816, only a few months before the Lincolns moved to Indiana. It shows that Thomas Lincoln had a standing in the community, which his biographers have always ignored. The appointment, if modest, would not have been made, we have a right to believe, if Lincoln had been the “easy-going” and idle fellow he has been asserted to be. ] CHAPTER II. THE BIRTH OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN.—HIS EARLY EDUCATION AND FRIENDS. It was at Elizabethtown that the first child of the Lincolns was born, a daughter. Soon after this event Thomas Lincoln decided to combine farming with his trade, and moved to the farm he had bought in 1803 on the Big South Fork of Nolin Creek, in Hardin County, now La Rue County, three miles from Hodgensville, and about fourteen miles from Elizabethtown. Here he was living when, on February 12, 1809, his second child, a boy, was born. The little new-comer was called Abraham, after his grandfather—a name which had persisted through many preceding generations of the Lincolns. The home into which the child came was the ordinary one of the poorer Western pioneer—a one-roomed cabin with a huge outside chimney, no windows, and only a rude door. The descriptions of its squalor and wretchedness, which are so familiar, have been overdrawn. Dr. Graham, than whom there is no better authority on the life of that day, and who knew Thomas Lincoln well, declares: “It is all stuff about Tom Lincoln keeping his wife in an open shed in a winter when the wild animals left the woods and stood in the corners next the stick-and-clay chimneys, so as not to freeze to death; or, if climbers, got on the roof. The Lincolns had a cow and calf, milk and butter, a good feather bed,—for I have slept in it, while they took the buffalo-robes on the floor, because I was a doctor. They had home-woven ‘kiverlids,’ big and little pots, a loom and wheel; and William Hardesty, who was there too, can say with me that Tom Lincoln was a man, and took care of his wife.” [Illustration: DEED OF SALE SIGNED BY THOMAS LINCOLN AND WIFE.—HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED.