"Oh, very well; I have the cottage at Springfield, and about eight
hundred dollars. If they make me vice-president with Seward, as some
say they will, I hope I shall be able to increase it to twenty
thousand. That is as much as any man ought to want!"


* * * * *


"I'LL HIT THE THING HARD!"

In Coffin's "Lincoln," it is stated that when Lincoln and Offutt,
boating to New Orleans, attended a slave auction for the first time,
the former said to his companion:

"By the Eternal, if ever I get a chance to hit this thing, I'll hit
it hard!"

The oath was General-President Jackson's, and familiar as a household
word at the day. The promise is premature in a youth of twenty.
Herndon, twenty-five years associated with Lincoln, doubts, but says
that Lincoln did allude to some such utterance. But it is Dennis
Hanks, cousin of Lincoln, who affirms that they two saw such a sight,
and that he knew by his companion's emotion that "the iron had entered
into his soul."

In 1841 Lincoln and Speed had a tedious low-water trip from Louisville
to St. Louis. Lincoln says: "There were on board ten or a dozen slaves
shackled together with irons. That sight was a continual torment to me
... a _thing_ which has and continually exercises the power of