Page:Life and Works of Abraham Lincoln, v1.djvu/53

Rh mother would fix up her little ones the best she could and send them diurnally on the long journey. She was persistent in her determination toinculcate education in their youthful minds. The father's enthusiasm was spasmodic and unreliable; still he would occasionally glow with pride in his educational plans for his bright, intelligent boy. At the age of forty-five Lincoln told Swett that the summum bonum of his father's ambition was to give his boy a first-rate education, and that his ne plus ultra of such an education was to "larn to cipher clean through the 'rithmetic."

In 1816 the land hunger which Thomas Lincoln had inherited from his father, the Virginia emigrant, led him to barter his imperfect title to his farm for ten barrels of rye whiskey and twenty dollars in cash, and go to Indiana on a prospecting tour, with a view to emigration. Such is the usual explanation of modern scientific biographers, who find the springs of momentous events in human impulses rather than in divine foreordination. An ancient chronicler would have said: "And the Angel of the Lord came to Thomas, and commanded that he take the young child and his mother and depart out of that country."