through a thrashing, I will do that, too, for your sake!"

The man "backed out." But he was ever afterward one of the champion's
warmest friends.


* * * * *


BOATING ON GROUND "A LEETLE DAMP."

In a letter of August, 1862, the President alludes to the amphibious
minor navy, which made their tracks "wherever the ground was a little
damp." This is hardly an exaggeration of Western shallow-water
navigation. Lincoln, as pilot on the Sangamon River in 1831, was
engaged to run a steamboat called the _Talisman_, after Sir
Walter Scott's popular romance. It was to test the point whether the
Sangamon River was navigable or not, an important local problem on
which Lincoln, later, got into the legislature. As he had "tried" the
river a good deal with the flatboats, he answered, he would try and do
the best he could. A large crowd flocked in from all sides to witness
the experiment. Lincoln guided the bark well up to the New Salem dam.
Here a gap had been cut to let the vessel slip through. But at a
place called Bogue's Mill, the water was rapidly lowering, and they
had to wheel about and get back, or be shoaled and be held there until
the spring freshets. The return trip was slow, as, though the stream
was in his favor, the high prairie wind delayed the boat. The falling
water had made the broken hole in the dam impracticable. But Lincoln
backed the _Talisman_ off as soon as she stranded and stuck; and,
by casting an anchor so as to act as a gigantic grapnel, to tear away