"My mother has been dead twenty years, Judge," was the mournful reply.
A trifle embarrassed, but not entirely off his base, the judge looked earnestly into the face of the bereaved, and said:
"My friend, excuse me, your countenance is perfectly familiar to me, but I do not at this moment remember exactly who you are."
The response was, "Judge, I am an evangelist."
To which the candidate for Congress, now upon a firm footing, tapped the man of the sacred office familiarly upon the shoulder and cheerfully exclaimed, "Why, damn it, Van, I thought I ought to know you!"
Returning now for brief sojourn to the afore-mentioned barbecue, with a faithful kinsman as monitor, aided by a slight moiety of tact to be credited to personal account, I managed passably well to get through the trying ordeal. "The old gentleman with the long white beard, coming toward us," observed my monitor, "is Uncle Jake Anderson. He has a hat bet that you will know him." Thus advised, I was ready for trial, and warmly grasping the hand extended me, I earnestly inquired, "Uncle Jake, how are you?" "Do you know me, boy?" was the immediate response. "Know you?" I replied. "You and my father were near neighbors for years; how could I help knowing you?" "Yes, of course," he said, "but you being gone so long, and now running for President, I didn't know but what you had forgotten all about the old neighbors down on the Lick." Assuring him that I had forgotten none of them, and congratulating him upon the hat he had won, I passed on to the next.
The interview described was repeated with slight variations, many times, when my attendant remarked:
"That man leaning against the tree is John Dunloe; do you remember him?"
"Certainly," I replied, "I went to school with him."
Immediately approaching my early classmate I took him by the hand and said, "How are you, John?"