Lincoln looked at the pig, at the deep mud, then down at his new clothes. Ruefully he rode on with them for some time. But the cries of the helpless animal rang in his ears. He could endure it no longer. Lagging behind the rest, he waited until they had passed a bend in the road. Then he turned and rode back as fast as his poor old horse could carry him through the mud. Dismounting, he surveyed the ground. The pig had struggled until it was almost buried in the mire, and was now too exhausted to move. After studying the case as if it were a problem in civil engineering, he took some rails off the fence beside the road. Building a platform of rails around the now exhausted hog, then taking one rail for a lever and another for a fulcrum, he began gently to pry the fat, helpless creature out of the sticky mud. In doing this he plastered his new suit from head to foot, but he did not care, as long as he could save that pig!
"Now, piggy-wig," he said. "It's you and me for it. You do your part and I'll get you out. Now—'one-two-three—up-a-daisy!'"
He smiled grimly as he thought of the jeers and sneers that would be hurled at him if his friends had stayed to watch him at this work.
After long and patient labor he succeeded in loosening the hog and coaxing it to make the attempt to get free. At last, the animal was made to see that it could get out. Making one violent effort it wallowed away and started for the nearest farmhouse, grunting and flopping its ears as it went.
Lawyer Lincoln looked ruefully down at his clothes, then placed all the rails back on the fence as he had found them.
He had to ride the rest of the day alone, for he did not wish to appear before his comrades until the mud on his suit had dried so that it could be brushed off. That night, when they saw him at the tavern, they asked him what he had been doing all day, eying his clothes with suspicious leers and grins. He had to admit that he could not bear to leave that hog to die, and tried to excuse his tender-heartedness to them by adding: "Farmer Jones's children might have had to go barefoot all Winter if he had lost a valuable hog like that!"
"BEING ELECTED TO CONGRESS HAS NOT PLEASED ME AS MUCH AS I EXPECTED"
In 1846 Abraham Lincoln was elected to Congress, defeating the Rev. Peter Cartwright, the famous backwoods preacher, who was elected to the State Legislature fourteen years before, the first time Lincoln was a candidate and the only time he was ever defeated by popular vote. Cartwright had made a vigorous canvass, telling the people that Lincoln was "an aristocrat and an atheist." But, though they had a great respect for Peter Cartwright and his preaching, the people did not believe all that he said against Lincoln, and they elected him. Shortly after this he wrote again to Speed:
"You, no doubt, assign the suspension of our correspondence to the true philosophic cause; though it must be confessed by both of us that this is a rather cold reason for allowing such a friendship as ours to die out by degrees.
"Being elected to Congress, though I am very grateful to our friends for having done it, has not pleased me as much as I expected."