I need only add that before I departed from that region he was comfortably married to his third wife, not having gotten round to it to have the funeral sermon of either of his first two wives. I am unable to say whether when he finally got round to it there was any increase in the number. It never was my fortune to conduct the joint funeral of two wives of the same man at the same time; but I have more than once been present where a second wife was prominent among the mourners; and I sometimes believed her to be sincerely sorry that the first wife was dead. It is not easy for people who have not lived amid these conditions and at the same time to have known other conditions to estimate aright the religious life of a backwoods community. Morse, whose biography of Lincoln is to be rated high, is completely unable to view this situation from other than his New England standpoint. He says: "The family was imbued with a peculiar, intense, but unenlightened form of Christianity, mingled with curious superstition, prevalent in the backwoods, and begotten by the influence of the vast wilderness upon illiterate men of a rude native force. It interests scholars to trace the evolution of religious faiths, but it might not be less suggestive to study the retrogression of religion into superstition. Thomas Lincoln was as restless in matters of creed as of residence, and made various changes in both during his life. These were, however, changes without improvement, and, so far as he was concerned, his son Abraham might have grown up to be what he himself was contented to remain" (I, 10). This criticism is partly just, but not wholly so. There was superstition enough in the backwoods religion, and Abraham Lincoln never wholly divested himself of it; but it was not all superstition. There was a very real religion on Pigeon Creek. In like manner, also, it is difficult for Lincoln's biographers to strike an even balance between adoring idealization of log-cabin life and horrified exaggeration of its squalor. Here again Morse is a classic example of the attempt to be so honest about Lincoln's poverty as to miss some part of the truth about it.