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about a matter of business, observing crustly that “a d-d hawk-billed Yankee is here besetting me at every turn I take, saying that Robert Kenzie never received the $80 to which he was entitled.”
In July, 1851, he wrote a facetious message to one of his clients, saying: “I have news from Ottawa that we win our case.
As the Dutch justice said when he married folks, ‘Now where ish my hundred tollars.’
1” He was proverbially careless as to habits.
In a letter to a fellow-lawyer in another town, apologizing for failure to answer sooner, he explains: “First, I have been very busy in the United States Court; second, when I received the letter I put it in my old hat and buying a new one the next day the old one was set aside, and so the letter was lost sight of for a time.”
This hat of Lincoln's — a silk plug — was an extraordinary receptacle.
It was his desk and his memorandum-book.
In it he carried
1 The following unpublished letter in possession of C. F. Gunther, Esq., Chicago, Ills., shows how he proposed to fill a vacancy in the office of Clerk of the United States Court. It reads like the letter of a politician in the midst of a canvass for office:
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