Page:Life and Works of Abraham Lincoln, v1.djvu/62

32 neighborhood. Poor children! Young Abe and his sister could not but observe with longing eyes the newly erected cabins of the newcomers rejoicing in puncheon floors, doors from boards hewed out of a straight-grained log, with occasionally a glazed sash to admit light.

This beautiful Pigeon Creek valley, like all sublunary pleasures, had its sting, its fly in the ointment. A disease equally to be dreaded with the cholera, and very similar alike in its manifestations and fatality, brooded like a spell over it, making it "a valley of the shadow of death." It prevailed in the wooded regions of both Indiana and Illinois, and was called, in the homely and inaccurate vernacular of those regions, "milk sick." It was a mysterious disease, and baffled science and medicine alike. In less than two years from the settlement of Thomas Lincoln on Pigeon Creek, his wife, and her uncle and aunt, all succumbed to this dread disease and died; and Thomas Lincoln by the aid of a neighbor constructed with a whipsaw from the native timber coffins for each of these three victims. In the primeval forest, the remains of Nancy Hanks Lincoln were placed in a rude box, made from native lumber, a very much coarser receptacle than fruit trees are transported in by nurserymen at this day ; and in the presence and by the aid of a mere handful of the neighbors, without ceremony, unanointed and unaneled, were committed to the grave. Even the grave remained without the slightest attempt at culture or adornment until 1879, when Mr. P. E. Studebaker of South Bend, Ind., having heard of it, proposed to Hon. Schuyler Colfax to head a subscription with fifty dollars in order to mark