William H. Herndon, Jesse William Weik, Herndon's Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life, Etiam in minimis major, The History and Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln by William H. Herndon, for twenty years his friend and Jesse William Weik

A letter from the lost Township.

I see you printed that long letter I sent you a spell ago. I'm quite encouraged by it, and can't keep from writing again. I think the printing of my letters will be a good thing all around — it will give me the benefit of being known by the world, and give the world the advantage of knowing what's going on in the Lost Township, and give your paper respectability besides. So here comes another. Yesterday afternoon I hurried through cleaning up the dinner dishes and stepped over to neighbor S .... to see if his wife Peggy was as well as mout be expected, and hear what they called the baby. Well, when I got there and just turned round the corner of his log cabin, there he was setting on the doorstep reading a newspaper. “How are you, Jeff?” says I. He sorter started when he heard me, for he hadn't seen me before. “Why,” says he, “I'm mad as the devil, Aunt ‘Becca!” “What about?” says I; “ain't its hair the right color? None of that nonsense, Jeff; there ain't an honester women in the Lost Townships than” --“Than who?” says he; “what the mischief are you about?” I began to see I was running the wrong trail, and so says I, “Oh! nothing; I guess I was mistaken a little, that's all. But what is it you're mad about?”

“Why,” says he, “I've been tugging ever since ”