Page:Daughters of Genius.djvu/27

 I.

IXTY-FIVE years ago, on a grassy hillock in the magnificent primeval forest of Southern Indiana, a few miles from the Ohio River, stood the small, unhewn, half-finished and most forlorn log-cabin of Thomas Lincoln. The father of the president was an idle, shiftless, worthless carpenter, who had taken up land in the wilderness, and lived by half cultivating a few acres and shooting the wild turkeys, the deer, and other game with which the region teemed. The occupants of the cabin were himself, his wife, whose maiden name was Nancy Hanks, and two children, Nancy, eleven years of age, and Abraham, the future president, nine.

I suppose there never was a more beautiful country than this part of Indiana, as it was before the settlers disfigured it. Imagine an undulating country covered with trees of the largest size, oaks, beeches, maples, walnuts, without that intertangled mass of undergrowth which we find in the primeval forests of the Eastern States.

This land had probably been, within a few centuries, a prairie. The forest had gained upon the grass; but, here and there, there was a small portion of the original prairie left, which, besides furnishing good pasture, gave to the region the aspect of an ancient, heavily-wooded park, the result of labor, wealth, and taste expended for ages. Upon some of these oases of emerald, the deer found (19)