Page:Life and Works of Abraham Lincoln, v1.djvu/63

Rh the spot with a suitable monument. Colfax assured him that the sum of fifty dollars alone would provide a monument sufficient and in harmony with the surroundings. The philanthropist thereupon caused to be erected a very neat marble monument, although the exact spot where the inanimate body crumbled into dust is involved in some doubt. It bears this inscription : ", mother of President Lincoln. Died October 5th, A.D. 1818, aged 35 years. Erected by a friend of her martyred son, 1879."

The mother thus commemorated was a woman "of sorrows and acquainted with grief." She was a child of the frontier, whose whole brief life was employed in removing from one frontier post to another, and carving out from the rude wilderness a frontier home.

In the little group which followed the body of this most faithful wife and mother to its last abode was one who was not satisfied with this heathen burial ; and he set himself resolutely at work to retrieve this neglect, and to secure to the burial of his revered mother an ex post facto ceremony and semblance of a Christian interment. In those days, in the frontier, stated and periodical ministrations from the sacred desk were not an institution on account of the paucity and poverty of the people. The pioneers, however, were content to accept the pious offices of such migratory clergymen as might chance to sojourn over Sunday in the neighborhood, in their wanderings. And thus a few years after his mother's death, young Abraham with considerable diplomacy for a lad of ten years, contrived to have an itinerant preacher named Daniel Elkin deliver