Then Abe had to say something, so he said, “Well, Uncle Jimmy, why don’t you tell us how many short breaths he took.”
“Everybody laughed and Uncle Jimmy got all-fired hot,” says Captain Lamar. “He spoke something about fighting Abe, and Abe said, ‘If you don’t shut up, I’ll throw you into the pond,’ and Uncle Jimmy shut up.”
Captain Lamar, in concluding his comments, said, “I was very much hurt at the way my hero was treated, but I have lived to change my ideas about heroes.”
V. LINCOLN’S FIRST DOLLAR
Lincoln enjoyed the commonplace interests of ordinary life, and much that we know of him is from conversations with friends over the early lessons of his youth.
One day while he was president, as he was talking with Secretary Seward over weighty affairs of state, he suddenly broke from the subject they were discussing and said, “Seward, do you know how I earned my first dollar?”
The well-to-do and rather aristocratic Secretary of State replied that he did not know.
“It was this way,” Lincoln continued. “I was about eighteen years of age and had succeeded in raising enough produce to justify a trip down the Ohio to the markets at New Orleans. I made a flatboat big enough to hold the barrels containing our things and was soon ready for loading up and starting on our journey.
“There were few landing places for steamers, and, where passengers desired to get on to one of the passing boats, they had to be taken out into the river in order to get aboard.
“While I was looking my boat over to see if anything more could be done to strengthen it, two men came down to the shore in a carriage, with their trunks, for the purpose of boarding a passing steamer. They looked the boats over and came down to me.