The Ancestry of Abraham Lincoln Author:James Henry Lea Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE ANCESTRY OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN CHAPTER I THE EMIGRANT, HIS HOME AND PARENTAGE EVING the train at Kimberley station on the Norwich and Dereham line, a... more »nd taking the road to Watton,— the reputed scene of the murder of the " Babes in the Wood,"—you find yourself, after a couple of miles of almost imperceptible ascent between typical English hedgerows, on the crest of a billow of hills of no great height, extending, roughly speaking, from northwest to southeast of the horizon. You are here in the very heart of a region of churches. From the spot where you stand half a score or more of towers and spires, marking each its thickly planted God's-acre, may be picked out on a clear day from amidst the surrounding landscape. The nearest rises directly before you—a square gray tower in a setting of green—at the distance of a short mile. It marks the site of what is destined to become, in the eyes of every patriotic American citizen, a national Mecca; for in it we have our first glimpse of Hingham, the birthplace of the man who gave to America one of her greatest sons—Abraham Lincoln. Of all the towns and villages in England which, close upon three centuries ago, contributed each its quota of hardy pio- neers towards the settlement of the American colonies, none gave more generously of her best and dearest than did this old- time market-town dozing beneath her gray church-tower. Her sons were " weary of forcing their beards into the orthodox bent," of "barking at the bishops," of tilling a soil they could never call their own. Other conditions, they had heard, prevailed beyond the seas, in a newer, broader land where the breath of life was not yet grown effete. Undeterred by the reputed hardships of existence there, they flocked westward, eager to be free. Amongst those who...« less