endured; that the law had been passed by chicanery and trickery; that the Springfield delegation had sold out to the internal improvement men, and had promised their support to every measure that would gain them a vote to the law removing the seat of government.’  He said many other things, cutting and sarcastic.  Lincoln was chosen by his colleagues to reply to Ewing; and I want to say here that this was the first time that I began to conceive a very high opinion of the talents and personal courage of Abraham Lincoln.  He retorted upon Ewing with great severity, denouncing his insinuations imputing corruption to him and his colleagues, and paying back with usury all that Ewing had said, when everybody thought and believed that he was digging his own grave; for it was known that Ewing would not quietly pocket any insinuations that would degrade him personally.  I recollect his reply to Lincoln well.  After addressing the Speaker, he turned to the Sangamon delegation, who all sat in the same portion of the house, and said:  ’Gentlemen, have you no other champion than this coarse and vulgar fellow to bring into the lists against me?  Do you suppose that I will condescend to break a lance with your low and obscure colleague?’ We were all very much alarmed for fear there would be a personal conflict between Ewing and Lincoln.  It was confidently believed that a challenge must pass between them; but friends on both sides took the matter in hand, and it was settled without anything serious growing out of it.”

When the legislative session ended, in February, 1837, Lincoln returned to a job of surveying which he had begun a year before at Petersburg, near his old home at Salem.  He spent a month or two at Petersburg, completing the surveying and planning of the town.  That his work was well and satisfactorily done is attested by many—­among them by Mr. John Bennett, who lived in Petersburg at the time.  “My earliest acquaintance with Lincoln,” says Mr. Bennett, “began on his return from Vandalia, where he had spent the winter as a member of the Legislature from Sangamon County.  Lincoln spent most of the month of March in Petersburg, finishing up the survey and planning of the town he had commenced the year before.  I was a great deal in his company, and formed a high estimate of his worth and social qualities, which was strengthened by many years of subsequent social intercourse and business transactions, finding him always strictly honest.  In fact, he was now generally spoken of in this region as ‘Honest Abe.’  After Menard County was formed out of a portion of Sangamon County, and the county seat established at Petersburg, Mr. Lincoln was a regular attendant at the courts.  I was then keeping a hotel, and he was one of my regular customers.  Here he met many of his old cronies of his early days at Salem, and they spent the most of the nights in telling stories or spinning long yarns, of which Mr. Lincoln was particularly fond.”

CHAPTER IV