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apparent that Grigsby was too much for Lincoln's man, Johnston.
After they had fought a long time without interference, it having been agreed not to break the ring, Abe burst through, caught Grigsby, threw him off and some feet away.
There he stood, proud as Lucifer, and swinging a bottle of liquor over his head swore he was ‘the big buck of the lick.’
‘If any one doubts it,’ he shouted, ‘he has only to come on and whet his horns.’
” A general engagement followed this challenge, but at the end of hostilities the field was cleared and the wounded retired amid the exultant shouts of their victors.
Much of the latter end of Abe's boyhood would have been lost in the midst of tradition but for the store of information and recollections I was fortunate enough to secure from an interesting old lady whom I met in Indiana in 1865.
She was the wife of Josiah Crawford1--“Blue Nose,” as Abe had named him --and possessed rare accomplishments for a woman reared in the backwoods of Indiana.
She was not only impressed with Abe's early efforts, but expressed great admiration for his sister Sarah, whom she often had with her at her own hospitable home and whom she described as a modest,
1 In one of her conversations with me Mrs. Crawford told me of the exhibitions with which at school they often entertained the few persons who attended the closing day. Sometimes, in warm weather, the scholars made a platform of clean boards covered overhead with green boughs. Generally, however, these exhibitions took place in the school-room. The exercises consisted of the varieties offered at this day at the average seminary or school — declamations and dialogues or debates. The declamations were obtained principally from a book called “The Kentucky Preceptor,” which volume Mrs. Crawford gave me as a souvenir of my visit. Lincoln had often used it himself, she said. The questions for discussion were characteristic of the day and age. The relative merits of the “Bee and the Ant,” the difference in strength between “Wind and water,” taxed their knowledge of physical phenomena; and the all-important question “Which has the most right to complain, the Indian or the Negro?” called out their conceptions of a great moral or national wrong. In the discussion of all these grave subjects Lincoln took a deep interest.
The Herndon's Lincoln Pubishing Company, Springfield, Ill., 1888.
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