第6章 THE MYSTERIOUS YOUTH(2)

What seed of new thinking was sown in his imagination by this Odyssey we shall never know.The obvious effect in the ten years of his life in Indiana was produced at Pigeon Creek.The "settlement"was within fifteen miles of the Ohio.It lay in that southerly fringe of Indiana which received early in the century many families of much the same estate,character and origin as the Lincolns,--poor whites of the edges of the great forest working outward toward the prairies.Located on good land not far from a great highway,the Ohio,it illustrated in its rude prosperity a transformation that went on unobserved in many such settlements,the transformation of the wandering forester of the lower class into a peasant farmer.Its life was of the earth,earthy;though it retained the religious traditions of the forest,their significance was evaporating;mysticism was fading into emotionalism;the camp-meeting was degenerating into a picnic.The supreme social event,the wedding,was attended by festivities that filled twenty-four hours:a race of male guests in the forenoon with a bottle of whisky for a prize;an Homeric dinner at midday;"an afternoon of rough games and outrageous practical jokes;a supper and dance at night interrupted by the successive withdrawals of the bride and groom,attended by ceremonies and jests of more than Rabelaisian crudeness;and a noisy dispersal next day."[3]The intensities of the forest survived in hard drinking,in the fury of the fun-making,and in the hunt.The forest passion for storytelling had in no way decreased.

In this atmosphere,about eighteen and nineteen,Abraham shot up suddenly from a slender boy to a huge,raw-honed,ungainly man,six feet four inches tall,of unusual muscular strength.

His strength was one of the fixed conditions of his development.It delivered him from all fear of his fellows.

He had plenty of peculiarities.He was ugly,awkward;he lacked the wanton appetites of the average sensual man.And these peculiarities without his great strength as his warrant might have brought him into ridicule.As it was,whatever his peculiarities,in a society like that of Pigeon Creek,the man who could beat all competitors,wrestling or boxing,was free from molestation.But Lincoln instinctively had another aim in life than mere freedom to be himself.Two characteristics that were so significant in his childhood continued with growing vitality in his young manhood:his placidity and his intense sense of comradeship.The latter,however,had undergone a change.It was no longer the comradeship of the wild creatures.That spurt of physical expansion,the swift rank growth to his tremendous stature,swept him apparently across a dim dividing line,out of the world of birds and beasts and into the world of men.He took the new world with the same unfailing but also unexcitable curiosity with which he had taken the other,the world of squirrels,flowers,fawns.