THE HORRORS FOR THE THIRD TIME!

When Abraham Lincoln was a poor young lawyer from Springfield,
attending the perambulatory court down at Lewiston, Illinois, he found
the place crowded by a Methodist meeting as well as the court having
an attractive case to try. He was obliged--because of exclusion from
the inn--to put up at the sheriff's house. Mrs. Davidson herself could
only offer him shares with Mr. Stephen A. Douglas, also a rising man,
and Peter Cartwright, the noted preacher--on the floor, but on a
feather bed. At that period the wild goose flew low. It may be
supposed that the student of Shakespeare might quote "When shall we
three meet again?" on rising between the famous border worthies in the
dawn. The hospitality was so refreshing that the trio spent the next
night there. They sat up by the large fireside, capping stories.
The enmity of lawyers, and even of politicians, is but skin-deep,
and Steve and Abe clashed not at all to meet the minister's reproof.
Lincoln rocked while story-telling in a cane-bottomed chair, taken
from the steamboat celebrated in Spoon River annals as its first
navigator. Lincoln was the more interested, as he had been boatman and
pilot on his river, the Sangamon. In the 1820's, this toy boat, the
_Utility_, struggled into the high water of Spoon River. It is a
tributary of the Illinois. Now, though the county is named Fulton,
none of the inhabitants knew anything about the inventor of steam
navigation, and doubted that a steamboat existed near them. Hence the
snorting, puffing, and clangor of the vessel as she surged against the
freshet, alarmed all the population in hearing when she ascended the
virgin Spoon.