If Lincoln at this time felt the divine afflatus of greatness stir within him I have never heard of it. It was rather common with us then in the West to suppose that there was no Presidential timber growing in the Northwest, yet, he doubtless had at that time the stuff out of which to make half a dozen Presidents.
I had known his relatives in Kentucky, and he asked me about them. His uncle, Mordecai Lincoln, I had known from my boyhood, and he was naturally a man of considerable genius; he was a man of great drollery, and it would almost make you laugh to look at him. I never saw but one other man whose quiet, droll look excited in me the same disposition to laugh, and that was Artemus Ward.
He was quite a story-teller, and in this Abe resembled his Uncle Mord, as we called him. He was an honest man, as tender-hearted as a woman, and to the last degree charitable and benevolent.
No one ever took offense at Uncle Mord’s stories—not even the ladies. I heard him once tell a bevy of fashionable girls that he knew a very large woman who had a husband so small that in the night she often mistook him for the baby, and that upon one occasion she took him up and was singing to him a soothing lullaby, when he awoke and told her that she was mistaken, that the baby was on the other side of the bed.
Lincoln had a very high opinion of his uncle, and on one occasion he said to me: “Linder, I have often said that Uncle Mord run off with the talents of the family.”
Old Mord, as we sometimes called him, had been in his younger days a very stout man, and was quite fond of playing a game of fisticuffs with any one who was noted as a champion.
He told a parcel of us once of a pitched battle that he had fought on the side of a hill or ridge; that at the bottom there was a rut or canal, which had been cut out by the freshets. He said they soon clinched, and he threw his man and fell on top of him.
He said he always thought he had the best eyes in the world for measuring distances, and having measured the distance to the bottom of the hill, he concluded that by rolling over and over till they came to the bottom his antagonist’s body would fill it, and he would be wedged in so tight that he could whip him at his leisure. So he let the fellow turn him, and over and over they went, when about the twentieth revolution brought Uncle Mord’s back in contact with the rut, “and,” said he, “before fire could scorch a feather, I cried out in stentorian voice: ‘Take him off!’”
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“Clary’s Grove Boys”—A Wrestling Match.