"What the jedge (Judge Douglas) has said, gentlemen, is true enough. I did keep a grocery, and sometimes I did sell whisky; but I remember that in those days Mr. Douglas was one of my best customers for the same. But the difference between us now is that I do not practise behind the bar at present, while Mr. Douglas keeps right on before it."
CONNUBIAL AMITY.
"Mr. Douglas has no more thought of fighting me than fighting his wife."--(Said during the Lincoln-Douglas debates, at a rumor that the senator would challenge him for some personality.)
THE MODEL WHISKY-BARREL.
During the Douglas-Lincoln series of debates, the former made a jest counting upon his being President some day. He said that his father was a cooper, yet, with prescience, had not taught him the paternal craft, but made him a cabinet-maker. His adherents who counted on office if he won loudly applauded. Douglas was a thick-set, rotund man, whose florid gills revealed that he was a host for boon companions. Lincoln was his antithesis, as tall, long-drawn, and somber as the cold-water man he was rated. He rose, and at once shot his shaft:
"I was not aware that Mr. Douglas' father was a cooper, but I doubt it not, or that he was a good one. In fact, I am certain that he has made one of the best whisky-casks I have ever seen!"
FIGHTING OUT OF ONE COAT INTO THE OTHER.
"I remember being once much amused at seeing two partially intoxicated men engaged in a fight, with their greatcoats on, which fight, after a long and rather harmless contest, ended in each having fought himself out of his own coat and into that of the other! If the two leading parties of to-day are really identical with the two in the days of Jefferson and Adams, they have performed the same feat as the two drunken men."--(Letter declining a Jefferson banquet invitation, Springfield, Illinois, April 6, 1859.)
THE PROMISING FACE!
"Senator Douglas is of world-wide renown. All the anxious politicians of his party have been looking upon him as certainly, at no distant day, to be the President of the United States. They have seen in his round, jolly, fruitful face post-offices, land offices, marshalships and cabinet appointments, chargé-ships and foreign missions, bursting and sprouting out in wonderful exuberance, ready to be laid hold of by their greedy hands.... On the contrary, nobody has ever expected me to be President. In my poor, lean, lank face nobody has ever seen that any cabbages were sprouting out."--(Speech by A. Lincoln, Springfield, Illinois, July 17, 1858.)