The Lincoln family was poor, even as poverty was estimated in the backwoods. Lincoln himself was painfully impressed with the memory of it, and Herndon and Lamon, who understood it better than most of his biographers, felt both for themselves and for Lincoln the pathos of his descent from "the poor whites"; but there is no evidence that Lincoln felt this seriously at the time. His melancholy came later, and was not the direct heritage of his childhood poverty. Life had its joys for families such as his. Poverty was accepted as in some sort the common lot, and also as a temporary condition out of which everybody expected sometime to emerge. Meantime the boy Abraham Lincoln had not only the joy of going to mill and to meeting, but also the privilege of an occasional frolic. We know of one or two boisterous weddings where he behaved himself none too well. Besides these there were other unrecorded social events on Pigeon Creek where the platter rolled merrily and he had to untangle his long legs from under the bench and move quickly when his number was called or pay a forfeit and redeem it. He played "Skip-to-My-Lou" and "Old Bald Eagle, Sail Around," and "Thus the Farmer Sows His Seed," and he moved around the room singing about the millwheel and had to grab quickly when partners were changed or stand in the middle and be ground between the millstones. As large a proportion of people's known wants were satisfied on Pigeon Creek as on some fashionable boulevards. We need not seek to hide his poverty nor idealize it unduly; neither is it necessary to waste overmuch of pity upon people who did not find their own condition pitiable. * * * * * What kind of man had been produced in this environment and as the result of the conditions of his heredity and of his inherent qualities? What do we know about the Abraham Lincoln who in 1830 took simultaneous leave of Indiana and his boyhood, and entered at once upon his manhood and the new State, that, twin-born with him, was waiting his arrival? He was a tall, awkward, uncouth backwoodsman, strong of muscle, temperate and morally clean. He had physical strength and was not a bully; was fond of a fight but fought fairly and as a rule on the side of weakness and of right. He was free from bad habits of all kinds, was generous, sympathetic, and kind of heart. He was as yet uninfluenced by any women except his own dead mother and his stepmother. He was socially shy, and had not profited greatly by the meager lessons in social usage which had been taught in Andrew Crawford's school. He was fond of cock-fighting and of boisterous sports, and had a sufficient leadership to proclaim himself "the big buck of the lick" and to have that declaration pass unchallenged.