"Come, fly down, birds, fly down, sparrows!" he muttered anxiously.
I recall in particular some white-crowned sparrows, the first ones I had seen in Florida.
There were a great many kinds of sparrows in that country, he said, and also of woodpeckers.
They moved into the latter before it was half completed; for by this time the Sparrows had followed the Lincolns from Kentucky, and the half-faced camp was given up to them.
"I was sitting by him one night and he suddenly told me: 'Father, when my grave is filled up crumble a piece of bread on it so that the sparrows may fly down, I shall hear and it will cheer me up not to be lying alone.' "
The Sparrows, husband and wife, died early in October, and Nancy Hanks Lincoln followed them after an interval of a few days. Thomas Lincoln made the coffins for his dead "out of green lumber cut with a whipsaw," and they were all buried, with scant ceremony, in a little clearing of the forest.