Abraham Lincoln was one of nature's noblemen.

He showed himself a hero in every circumstance of his boyhood and youth.

The elements of greatness were visible even then.

The boy who was true to duty, patient in privation, modest in merit, kind to every form of distress, determined to rise by wresting opportunities from the grudging hand of fate, was sure to make a man distinguished among his fellows,--a man noted among the great men of the world, as the boy had been among his neighbors in the wilds of Spencer County and New Salem.
The site of the town where Lincoln spent the last three years of the period covered in this portion of his biography is now a desolate waste.
A gentleman who visited the spot during the summer of 1885 thus describes the mournful scene: "From the hill where I sit, under the shade of three trees whose branches make one, I look out over the Sangamon river and its banks covered apparently with primeval forests.
Around are fields overgrown with weeds and stunted oaks.

It was a town of ten or twelve years only.