Lincoln Read Online Free Page B

to take corn over to Gordon’s mill, some two miles distant, to be ground into meal. When he got there, he hitched his old mare to the arm of the gristmill. Because it was getting late and he was in a hurry to get home before dusk, he tried to speed up the mare by giving her a stroke of the whip with each revolution. She lashed out at him with a kick that landed on his forehead, and he fell bleeding and unconscious. At first it was thought that he was dead and his father was summoned. He could not speak for several hours, but he revived and suffered no permanent damage.
    Then the Little Pigeon Creek community was devastated by an attack of what was called milk sickness. It was a mysterious ailment, which settlers realized was somehow connected with the milk of their cows, but it was not until many years later that scientists discovered that the cows, which ran wild in the forest, had been eating the luxuriant but poisonous white snakeroot plant. Dizziness, nausea, and stomach pains were the initial symptoms, followed by irregular respiration and pulse, prostration, and coma. Death usually occurred within seven days. Thomas and Elizabeth Sparrow were first afflicted, and Thomas Lincoln sawed rough boards to make coffins to bury them in. Then Nancy fell ill. She struggled on, day after day, for a week, but she knew she was failing. Calling her children to her bedside, she “told them to be good and kind to their father—to one an other and to the world.” She died on October 5, and Thomas Lincoln buried another coffin on a wooded knoll a quarter of a mile from the cabin.
    The next year may have been the hardest in Abraham Lincoln’s life. With the help of Dennis Hanks, who moved in with the Lincolns after the Sparrows died, Thomas was able to put food on the table. “We still kept up hunting and farming,” Dennis remembered. “We always hunted[;] it made no difference what came, for we more or less depended on it for a living—nay for life.” Sarah, who had her twelfth birthday in February 1819, tried to cook and keep house, but at times she felt so lonesome that she would sit by the fire and cry. To cheer her up, Dennis recalled, “me ‘n’ Abe got ‘er a baby coon an’ a turtle, an’ tried to get a fawn but we couldn’t ketch any.”
    Abe—as Dennis and the other children insisted on calling the boy, eventhough he always disliked the nickname—left no words describing his sense of loss. His wound was too sensitive to touch. But many years later he wrote a letter of condolence to a bereaved child: “In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares.... I have had experience enough to know what I say.”
    Deeper consequences of the loss of his mother before he was ten years old can only be a matter of speculation. It is tempting to trace his subsequent moodiness, his melancholy, and his occasional bouts of depression to this cause, but the connections are not clear and these patterns of behavior appear in persons who have never experienced such loss. Perhaps his mother’s death had something to do with his growing aversion to cruelty and bloodshed. Now he began to reprove other children in the neighborhood for senseless cruelty to animals. He scolded them when they caught terrapins and heaped hot coals on their shells, to force the defenseless animals out of their shells, reminding them “that an ant’s life was to it as sweet as ours to us.” Certainly the death of his mother, coming so soon after the deaths of other friends and neighbors, gave a gloomy cast to his memories of his Indiana home. In the 1840s, revisiting his old neighborhood, he recorded his thoughts in verse:
    My childhood’s home I see again,
    And sadden with the view;
    And still, as mem’ries crowd my brain,
    There’s pleasure in it too.
. . .
     
    I range the fields with pensive tread,
    And pace the hollow rooms,
    And feel (companion of the dead)
    I’m