that. But he had made a "noble resolution" not to do so, and his financial embarrassments would not have been of long standing had he kept that resolution and married Patsy and remained in Kentucky, or taken her with him to Illinois.

He visited Patsy one night, as these letters show, and she never saw him again. That was the night of his "elopement" as his expectant father-in-law calls it.

These are dignified letters, from a man of standing and official position, and they disclose a father's sorrow for a daughter's disappointment. Why did Mordecai run away when he was to be married?

Some first-hand information exists concerning the younger Mordecai during his life in Leitchfield, Grayson County, Kentucky. Rev. John W. Cunningham, who was born in that town in 1824, and lived there until he was nearly fifteen years of age, was a lad between twelve and thirteen when Mordecai left, and he remembered the details with distinctness when at the age of seventy-nine, he wrote some of his reminiscences for the Elizabethtown (Kentucky) News, in September, 1903. Insofar as his recollections related to the Lincoln family, they were chiefly located in Hardin County, where Abraham Lincoln was born, and where Mr. Cunningham later preached. He related, however, that in his home in Leitchfield, there lived a Lincoln family, children of a brother of Abraham Lincoln's father.

He wrote:

"I am not sure of the first name of Thomas Lincoln's brother in my native town. . . . (It was Mordecai, the older). He had a married daughter and a bachelor son in our village. The daughter's husband was George Washington Neighbors, who was for several years the acting sheriff of the county. . . Mrs. Neighbor's brother was Mordecai Lincoln, first cousin of Abraham. He was commonly known as 'Old Mord.' though I did not think of him as an old man. He was the village shoemaker, and occupied a house of his own, with an upper story, where he slept, a lower room, that he used for his shoe shop. All of the little boys liked him because of the bits of thread and wax that he gave them. The house, I presume, is standing, and is one of the oldest in the village. Mordecai was a fiddler, and he had a fiddle that had been made by a Revolutionary soldier from pieces of sugar-tree wood with a shoe-knife as his only implement for making it. Of pleasant nights he would sit on an upper or lower porch to the house, and make sweet music for the town, and would sometimes call forth responsive wild-wolf howls in a neighboring wood.

"Some time after I left home for Elizabethtown, Mordecai went away to Illinois, leaving everything behind him. There were claims. on his possessions which the law disposed of. On one of my visits. home I found Mord's fiddle there and took it home to Elizabethtown with me. There, for two or three years, I scraped the strings of Old Mord's Revolutionary fiddle, but I never equaled the performances of the clever village shoemaker. I finally gave the fiddle to my brother, from whom it was stolen by a wandering clock-peddler.... I have heard Theodore Thomas' forty fiddlers, and many others of note in concerts, but the memory of Old Mord's long-meter fiddling is sweeter to me than any of them."

Mr. Cunningham contributed a later article to the Louisville Times, March 29, 1909, in which he gave some added details:

All

"Mordecai was a charming fiddler. In cold weather, he made music for his own entertainment in his own bedroom or shoe shop. In summer weather he made music for all who could hear his performance as he sat on the second floor of his two story front porch. He ate his meals wherever he made arrangements for them. the small boys were his friends, and older people were kindly disposed to him. I remember him as a man not more than forty-five years old, but he was commonly called 'Old Mord.' One night he left his home, his possessions and the town, and went away to Indiana and never returned. There was no complaint of wrong-doing against him."

These two articles by a competent and truthful man assure us that Mordecai had no known occasion to leave Leitchfield and Kentucky, and it is but fair to say that nothing in the letters from Patsy's father, and nothing that has been learned from any other source, indicates that he had betrayed Patsy's confidence. Evidently the people of Leitchfield did not know that he had run away to get rid of Patsy and the prospect of matrimony. But he left from her home, and in the night, not returning to his house to take away his precious fiddle.

And he never owned a fiddle afterward, though he often visited. at homes where there were violins, and when he did so, would take up the fiddle, tune it, and walk the floor playing it, the tears coursing down his cheeks. When he ran away from Patsy, he ran away

from his fiddle.

All of Mordecai's near relatives wished he would marry. His mother was glad to have a son for whom to keep house, but Mordecai was not always a comfort to his mother. Mary Mudd Lincoln

was a devout Catholic, and she made Catholics, not all of them very devout ones, of that branch of the Lincoln family. But some of them revolted. Mordecai was almost violent in his opposition to his mother's religion. He uttered some harsh words about it while he was yet in Kentucky, and on the Sunday following one of these diatribes he heard the priest quote his words, and say that no man who uttered such words could prosper in this life or the next. Mordecai said that after that, and after some things which he said about the priest, the priest would never look him in the eye, either on the street or in the pulpit.

One of Mordecai's sisters went to a convent for a year. He tells the story in a manuscript before me. He says that when she went to the convent, it was promised that she should be educated; but she was not taught but was kept at hard work, weaving, and forgot much of what she had known before she went to the convent, and, moreover, came home weakened by the hard labor. He said that a new ecclesiastical name was given her, and the priest "slapped a veil on her." Mordecai tells how he went to the convent and brought her away. She later married, but did not live very long, and he said that her convent experience shortened her life.

We have no way of checking up these bitter affirmations. But we see that Mordecai had a passion for writing out his convictions. And all this denunciation of the nuns and the priests and the people of the church must have been hard for Mary Mudd Lincoln to hear.

His mother made efforts to change his mind concerning these matters, and she persuaded her other children; but Mordecai wrote a letter to "The Widow Lincoln and Her Family" declaring his independence.

But except for these matters, Mordecai Lincoln was a good son, and his mother loved him. And she saw that he did not care for women, and knew that she was likely to have him as her support as long as she lived.

It was a hard task which Mary Mudd undertook when, marrying the older Mordecai Lincoln, she endeavored to make good Catholics out of a stock that for generations had been Baptist. The measure of her success should have rewarded her in part for her difficulties. While none of the Lincolns who married Catholic wives became very ardent Catholics, and some of the younger generations revolted, there remains a strong Catholic strain in this branch of the family, and Mary Mudd introduced it.

But she had a hard time with her son Mordecai. He sat by the

fire and wrote long treatises against the Jesuits, and at times he burst forth into violent invective. Some things that he wrote would not look well in this article. And yet, Mordecai had a strain of reverence, and once, not having acknowledged any other religion. and being pressed for a definition of his own position, he said that judged by his own standards, and not by those of the priests whom he hated, he was still a Catholic. It would have gladdened Mary Mudd to know that after all the evil things he said about her religion, he would be buried, as he was, beside her, in consecrated ground. There is a forlorn little old cemetery, a half mile back through fields, where the little Catholic church once stood. Not one stone now stands erect. But in that cemetery Mary Mudd Lincoln and her vehemently protesting son Mordecai lie side by side.

Mordecai was a man of moods. So were nearly all the Lincolns. After the death of his mother, he lived like a hermit. He had a dog and a cat and his books-all the Lincolns managed to have some books, and Mordecai, if not a diligent reader, was a student. He had a great memory. A neighbor loaned him Victor Hugo's great story, and he read it so intently that the characters all became real to him, and he could relate the story almost verbatim.

At times, Mordecai worked with great industry, but he was a Lincoln in the matter of hard work. He was strong, and capable of working, and at times he showed steady industry. But his moods as to labor varied. He did not enjoy labor for its own sake, and there were days when he forsook his work and loafed and told stories, or engaged in acrimonious controversy. His cousin Abraham had a dangerous gift of sarcasm, and at times used it mercilessly; but he learned how to curb it. Mordecai never learned, and he was always ready to stop work and say harsh things about the people and institutions he hated. He liked his lathe, and did his work well. He made wagons and coffins and clothes presses and many other articles. But at times he stopped work and brooded, or went to the woods and was gone for a whole day, hardly speaking to any one he met, but returning in his normal frame of mind.

By fits and starts he visited his neighbors. No one knew when or why he was coming and seldom knew just why he had come. Sometimes he sat and talked politics or religion or neighborhood news. Sometimes he came to curse a neighbor or a relative or to tell his opinion of the priests. Sometimes he would enter a house and take up the violin, and play it, walking the floor, with tears streaming down his cheeks.

Crazy? Not at all. All the Lincolns were odd. No one of them ever went insane. But there ran through the entire family an unstable equilibrium of intellectuality and emotion.

Mordecai Lincoln cultivated flowers, and in that regard was most unlike his cousin Abraham, who said that in such matters, something appeared to have been left out of his nature. Hancock County still has its "Uncle Mord roses" which he propagated. He was fond of fruit, and the Lincoln farms have excellent fruit trees to this day. He had a trick which he liked to play at the Joe Duncan school. He would go there with a bag of big red apples, open the door, and roll an apple to every boy and every girl, carefully saving the biggest and reddest one for the teacher.

With all his cantankerousness, he was a likable man, and had many traits that endeared him to people. And, spite of all his crabbedness toward his mother on account of her religion, he was a good son.

In some of his dark moods, he drank so heavily that his friends were troubled about him. Some of them came to him and advised him to stop drinking. I have a letter written by him August 16, 1853, and it is rather more than possible that it was written to a Protestant minister, but the name is not given. In it Mordecai says:

"As for your hopes or wishes with regard to me, they don't interrupt my mind at all. I clame it as my rite to drink anything I please to drink and by the same rule I clame it as my wright if I think it best for my self to let it alone."

It will be noted that his spelling sometimes was erratic, but this was true of most letters of the period, and his handwriting was good. Although he drank, and sometimes drank too much, he was not as heavy a drinker as his father, and was not accounted a drunkard.

The exact age of Mordecai I do not have. His parents were married in 1792, and his two older brothers appear to have been born before 1800. They both, and his sister Elizabeth, who married. her cousin Ben Mudd, were married before they left Kentucky in 1829, but his two younger sisters were young and unmarried at that time. He was of age, and capable of attending to legal business in 1830, but probably was not much past 21 in that year in which Abraham Lincoln, the future President, came of age. Practically, he was of the age of the President, and in many respects much like him in his mental make-up.

All the Lincolns in Hancock County were men of ability, and their abilities were of the same general kind as those of Abraham