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Book, page 130 / 313 distraught; but that in the course of a few days it all passed off, leaving no trace whatever. "I think," says Mr. Browning, "it was only an intensification of his constitutional melancholy; his trials and embarrassments pressed him down to a lower point than usual." [Illustration: FAC-SIMILE OF THE MARRIAGE CERTIFICATE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN. From the original in the Keyes Lincoln Memorial Collection, Chicago.] [Sidenote: "Western Characters," p. 134.] This taint of constitutional sadness was not peculiar to Lincoln; it may be said to have been endemic among the early settlers of the West. It had its origin partly in the circumstances of their lives, the severe and dismal loneliness in which their struggle for existence for the most part went on. Their summers were passed in the solitude of the woods; in the winter they were often snowed up for months in the more desolate isolation of their own poor cabins. Their subjects of conversation were limited, their range of thoughts and ideas narrow and barren. There was as little cheerfulness in their manners as there was incentive to it in their lives. They occasionally burst out into wild frolic, which easily assumed the form of comic outrage, but of the sustained cheerfulness of social civilized life they knew very little. One of the few pioneers who have written their observations of their own people, John L. McConnell, says, "They are at the best not a cheerful race; though they sometimes join in festivities, it is but seldom, and the wildness of their dissipation is too often in proportion to its infrequency. There is none of that serene contentment which distinguishes the tillers of the ground in other lands.... Acquainted with the character [of the pioneer], you do not expect him to smile much, but now and then he laughs." Besides this generic tendency to melancholy, very many of the pioneers were subject in early life to malarial influences, the effect of which remained with them all their days. Hewing out their plantations in the primeval woods amid the undisturbed shadow of centuries, breaking a soil thick with ages of vegetable decomposition, sleeping in half- faced camps, where the heavy air of the rank woods was in their lungs all night, or in the fouler atmosphere of overcrowded cabins, they were especially subject to miasmatic fevers. Many died, and of those
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