"Look here, old gentleman," remarked President Lincoln, who was sitting alongside, "we've got just the nets for traitors, in the bayous or anywhere."
"Hey? What nets?"
"Bayou-nets!" and "Uncle Abraham" pointed his joke with his fork, spearing a fishball savagely.
DIDN'T TRUST THE COURT
In one of his many stories of Lincoln, his law partner, W. H. Herndon, told this as illustrating Lincoln's shrewdness as a lawyer:
"I was with Lincoln once and listened to an oral argument by him in which he rehearsed an extended history of the law. It was a carefully prepared and masterly discourse, but, as I thought, entirely useless. After he was through and we were walking home, I asked him why he went so far back in the history of the law. I presumed the court knew enough history.
"'That's where you're mistaken,' was his instant rejoinder. 'I dared not trust the case on the presumption that the court knows everything—in fact I argued it on the presumption that the court didn't know anything,' a statement, which, when one reviews the decision of our appellate courts, is not so extravagant as one would at first suppose."
"TAD" GOT HIS DOLLAR
No matter who was with the President, or how intently absorbed, his little son "Tad" was always welcome. He almost always accompanied his father.