Band books

His was indeed a marvellous growth. The statesman or the military hero
born and reared in a log cabin is a familiar figure in American history;
but we may search in vain among our celebrities for one whose origin and
early life equalled Abraham Lincoln's in wretchedness. He first saw the
light in a miserable hovel in Kentucky, on a farm consisting of a few
barren acres in a dreary neighborhood; his father a typical "poor
Southern white," shiftless and without ambition for himself or his
children, constantly looking for a new piece of land on which he might
make a living without much work; his mother, in her youth handsome and
bright, grown prematurely coarse in feature and soured in mind by daily
toil and care; the whole household squalid, cheerless, and utterly void
of elevating inspirations... Only when the family had "moved" into the
malarious backwoods of Indiana, the mother had died, and a stepmother, a
woman of thrift and energy, had taken charge of the children, the
shaggy-headed, ragged, barefooted, forlorn boy, then seven years old,
"began to feel like a human being.


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