Besides all this patronage, Offut went about the region bragging in his extravagant way that his clerk “knew more than any man in the United States,” would some day be President, and could now throw or thrash any man in those parts.  Now it so happened that some three miles out from New Salem lay Clary’s Grove, the haunt of a gang of frontier ruffians of the familiar type, among whom one Jack Armstrong was champion bully.  Offut’s boasting soon rendered an encounter between Lincoln and Armstrong inevitable, though Lincoln did his best to avoid it, and declared his aversion to “this woolling and pulling.”  The wrestling match was arranged, and the settlers flocked to it like Spaniards to a bull-fight.  Battle was joined and Lincoln was getting the better of Armstrong, whereupon the “Clary’s Grove boys,” with fine chivalry, were about to rush in upon Lincoln and maim him, or worse, when the timely intervention of a prominent citizen possibly saved even the life of the future President.[26] Some of the biographers, borrowing the license of poets, have chosen to tell about the “boys” and the wrestling match with such picturesque epithets that the combat bids fair to appear to posterity as romantic as that of Friar Tuck and Robin Hood.  Its consequence was that Armstrong and Lincoln were fast friends ever after.  Wherever Lincoln was at work, Armstrong used to “do his loafing,” and Lincoln made visits to Clary’s Grove, and long afterward did a friendly service to “old Hannah,” Armstrong’s wife, by saving one of her vicious race from the gallows, which upon that especial occasion he did not happen to deserve.  Also Armstrong and his gang gave Lincoln hearty political support, and an assistance at the polls which was very effective, for success generally smiled on that candidate who had as his constituency[27] the “butcher-knife boys,” the “barefooted boys,” the “half-horse, half-alligator men,” and the “huge-pawed boys.”

An item less susceptible of a poetic coloring is that about this time Lincoln ransacked the neighborhood in search of an English grammar, and getting trace of one six miles out from the settlement, he walked over to borrow or to buy it.  He brought it back in triumph, and studied it exhaustively.

There are also some tales of his honesty which may stand without disgrace beside that of Washington and the cherry-tree, and may be better entitled to credit.  It is said that, while he was “keeping shop” for Offut, a woman one day accidentally overpaid him by the sum of fourpence, and that he walked several miles that night to restore the sum to her before he slept.  On another occasion, discovering that in selling half a pound of tea he had used too small a weight, he started instantly forth to make good the deficiency.  Perhaps this integrity does not so much differentiate Lincoln from his fellows as it may seem to do, for it is said that honesty was the one distinguishing virtue of that queer society.  None the less these legends are exponents, which the