LINCOLNICS "God Bless my Mother!" "God bless my mother! all that I am, or hope to be, I owe to her!" Lincoln lost his mother in 1818, when he was about eight years old. But she had taught him to read and write without books other than the Bible. Fortunately his father's second wife continued to nurture the boy on intellectual food and induced his father to send him to school. The general practice in the wilderness, where all were short-handed," was to get the boys out a-field as much and as soon as possible. 66 You would Lose your Latin there. Lincoln said of the rude frontier country where he was brought up: “If a 3 straggler, supposed to understand Latin, happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizard." He knew no Latin except that found in his old copy of "Blackstone," and English law Latin-Obscuris vera involvens ! Lincoln's own Childish Horoscope. (Scribbled in a blank-book made by his hand.) (Written 1820, but it may be a copybook motto, then popular, and often set by the teacher.) "Good boys who to their books apply Will all be great men by-and-by." Respect for the Eggs, not the Hat. In Lincoln's youth, when his attire was as unmodish as his appearance, he attended the performance of an itinerant juggler. The latter produced a bag of eggs and offered to make an omelet in a hat without injury to the latter. The trick, though dating back to the Dark Ages, was new to the spectators in the village, but the absence of hats prevented a ready tender of the required adjunct, until Abraham, urged forward by the neighbors, as wearing what might pass for a hat, handed up his headgear. It was woolly, of low-crowned and broadbrimmed shape, and had seen the worst sort of weather. In fact, the wearer apologized in these terms: "Mister, the reason why I did not offer you my hat before was out of respect for your eggs, not from care for the hat!" After the Wrong Man. At one time while Lincoln was engaged in chopping rails, the "bully of the county" (Sangamon, Ill.), perhaps set on by some practical joker, came to "the boys" in the woods and, with set design, challenged "the greeny" (Lincoln) to a fight. The great brawny, awkward boy laughed and drawled out: "I reckon, stranger, you're after the wrong man. I never fit in my whole life." But the bully made for Abe, and in the first fall Lincoln came down on top of the heap. The champion was bruising and causing blood to flow down Lincoln's face, when a happy mode of warfare entered his original brain. He quickly thrust his hands into a convenient bunch of smartweed and rubbed the same in the eyes of his opponent, who almost instantly begged for mercy. He was released, but his sight, for the time being, was extinct. No member of the trio possessed a pocket handkerchief, so Lincoln tore from his own shirt front the surplus cloth, washed and bandaged the fellow's eyes and sent him home. John White, reprinted in Viroqua, Making the Wool Fly. On Lincoln's first trip to New Orleans on a flatboat, he, and his crew of one, were attacked by negroes at Baton Rouge. In a brisk hand-to-hand resistance, the thieves were repelled. After their flight Abraham's companion regretted that they had not carried guns. "If armed, would n't we have made the feathers fly?" said he. 66 The wool, you mean!" corrected the other, as they were not that kind of black birds." If You Hit, Hit Hard! On coming out of a slave auction salesroom in New Orleans, Lincoln, who had |