The distance the family had to travel was only about seventy miles. It would not take long to travel seventy miles on a good road, but often these movers had not so much as a bridle-path to follow, and had to cut their way through the thick underbrush of the forest.

The roads that had been marked out were very poor, and the horses picked their way slowly between stumps and stones. To cross streams they had to find good fording-places, for there were no bridges. But at length the movers reached their new home on Pigeon Creek, about sixteen miles north of the Ohio River.

CHAPTER II.

THE INDIANA HOME.

WINTER was now coming on, and necessity drove even lazy Thomas Lincoln to work. He sharpened his ax and, selecting a spot for a dwelling, began to chop down the trees growing there. He was not unaided in this work. wife and little son were both able to wield the ax with long swinging strokes that drove its edge far into the tough wood.

His

Together they built with more haste than care a "half-faced camp" of logs; a half-faced camp was a shed roofed over and enclosed on the three sides from which cold winds were most likely to blow, but left open on the other. No doors, windows, nor chimneys were needed in this dwelling.

The open side gave plenty of light and air, and there the fire of brush and logs burned night and day to keep the prowling wolves

away and to boil the kettle and bake the corncakes. It did not require great skill in carpentry to make the furniture for the camp. A cross-section of a large log, supported on blocks of wood, served for a table, and three or four three-legged stools and a platform on which leaves, corn-husks, and skins might be strewn for a bed, made up the entire outfit.

When this rude shelter was completed and furnished there was still a hard year's work before Thomas Lincoln. Hunting was not a matter of sport but of necessity for him that fall. If he did not provide a good stock of smoked deer-meat the family might starve. Skins, for winter garments and to serve for blankets during the long cold nights when the fire burned low, had to be provided.

But the great work was to continue the clearing, to make space for a few acres of corn and a patch of wheat in the coming spring, and with the logs cut from the felled trees Thomas Lincoln built a permanent dwelling house.

The family did not suffer so much as you

might suppose during the winter in the half

faced camp. Felling trees was hard enough work to keep them warm even on the coldest days. The corn-cakes and the pork and venison they ate were nourishing and heat producing.

Constant exposure to the cold so hardened them that they were less sensitive than people accustomed to to live in comfortable houses would be in such circumstances. Indeed, they were so well pleased with their new home that they sent glowing reports of it to their friends.

The next spring some of Mrs. Lincoln's relatives, members of the Hanks. family, came to join them in Indiana. The house was so nearly completed that the Lincoln family moved into it and gave up the camp to the The house was quite the best the family had ever lived in. It was made of hewn logs that fit neatly together.

new-comers.

The chimney was wide and deep. The room was eighteen feet square, and above it was a low loft, where Abraham Lincoln slept during his boyhood. A square opening was left in the floor of the loft, and a row of pegs driven into

the logs beneath it made as convenient a stairway as the long-limbed boy cared for.

A floor, windows, and doors in the livingroom were luxuries that Thomas Lincoln intended to indulge in at some future time, but after a winter in the half-faced camp the cabin seemed very comfortable without them. long as all were well and strong the pioneers in the wilderness home got along well enough in spite of loneliness, hard work, and poverty.

As

But in the autumn of 1818 an illness peculiar to the new, undeveloped country broke out in southern Indiana, making cattle and men sick, and causing many deaths. Then they felt how hard it was to have no doctor within reach, no money to send thirty or forty miles to secure one, and no friendly neighbors to help to nurse and care for the sick.

Illness first visited the half-faced camp and two members of that household died. Before they were buried, Mrs. Lincoln was stricken with the disease. For seven days she suffered. Her husband and children did what they could to relieve her pain, but in spite of their best