After this jocular exchange of greeting, the joke cemented friendship between them. The proof of the friendship is in the usefulness of it. Lincoln turned to this acquaintance in his dilemma.
This future President may have divined the saying of the similarly martyred McKinley--about "the cheap clothes making a cheap man." He summed up his situation:
"I must certainly have decent clothes to go there among the celebrities."
No doubt, the State capital had other fashions than those prevailing at Sangamon town, where even the shopkeeper's present attire, in which he had solicited suffrages, was scoffed at as below the mark. It was composed of "flax and tow-linen pantaloons (one Ellis, storekeeper, describes from eye-witnessing), I thought, about five inches too short in the legs, exposing blue-yarn socks (the original of the Farmers' Sox of our mailorder magazines); no vest or coat; and but one suspender. He wore a calico shirt, as he had in the Black Hawk War; coarse brogans, tan color."
"As you voted for me," went on the ambitious man about to exchange the counter for the rostrum, "you must want me to make a decent appearance in the state-house?"
"Certainly," was the reply, as anticipated, Lincoln was so sure of his wheedling ways by this time.
And the friend in need supplied him with two hundred dollars currency, which, according to the budding legislator's promise, he returned out of his first pay as representative.
THE ABUTMENT WAS DUBERSOME.
President Lincoln was told that the Northern and Southern Democrats had at last accomplished a fusion.
"Well, I believe you, of course," said he to the informant, "but I have my doubts of the foundation, like my friend Brown. Brown is a sound church member. He was member, too, of a township committee, having to receive bids for building a bridge over a deep and rapid river. The contractors did not seem to like the proposition, so Brown called in an architectural acquaintance, named--we will say, Jones. At the question 'Can you build this bridge?' he was overbold, and replied: 'Yes, sir, or any other. I could build a bridge from Sodom to Gomorrah with abutment below.' The committee being good and select men were shocked at the strong language, and Brown was called upon to defend his protégé.