It is with great pleasure that we dismiss Tom Lincoln, with his family and fortunes, from further consideration in these pages. After Abraham left him, he moved at least three times in search of a "healthy" location, and finally got himself fixed near Goose Nest Prairie, in Coles County, where he died of a disease of the kidneys, in 1851, at the ripe old age of seventy-three. The little farm (forty acres) upon which his days were ended, he had, with his usual improvidence, mortgaged to the School Commissioners for two hundred dollars,--its full value. Induced by love for his step-mother, Abraham had paid the debt, and taken a deed for the land, "with a reservation of a life-estate therein, to them, or the survivor of them." At the same time (1841), he gave a helping hand to John Johnston, binding himself to convey the land to him, or his heirs, after the death of "Thomas Lincoln and his wife," upon payment of the two hundred dollars, which was really advanced to save John's mother from utter penury. No matter how much the land might appreciate in value, John was to have it upon these terms, and no interest was to be paid by him, "except after the death of the survivor, as aforesaid." This, to be sure, was a great bargain for John, but he made haste to assign his bond to another person for "fifty dollars paid in hand." As soon as Abraham got a little up in the world, he began to send his step-mother money, and continued to do so until his own death; but it is said to have "done her no good," for it only served to tempt certain persons about her, and with whom she shared it, to continue in a life of idleness. At the close of the Black Hawk War, Mr. Lincoln went to see them for a few days, and afterwards, when a lawyer, making the circuits with the courts, he visited them whenever the necessities of his practice brought him to their neighborhood. He did his best to serve Mrs. Lincoln and her son John, but took little notice of his father, although he wrote him an exhortation to believe in God when he thought he was on his death-bed. But in regard to the relations between the family and Abe, after the latter began to achieve fame and power, nobody can tell the truth more clearly, or tell it in a more interesting and suggestive style, than our friend Dennis, with whom we are now about to part forever. It will be seen, that, when information reached the "Goose Nest Prairie" that Abe was actually chosen President of the United States, a general itching for public employment broke out among the Hankses, and that an equally general disappointment was the result. Doubtless all of them had expectations somewhat like Sancho Panza's, when he went to take the government of his island, and John Hanks, at least, would not have been disappointed but for the little disability which Dennis mentions in the following extract:--