of the representatives from Sangamon.

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, "befor