Illinois.  “I can see him now,” says Judge Weldon, “through the decaying memories of thirty years, standing in the corner of the old court-room, and as I approached him with a paper I did not understand, he said:  ’Wait until I fix this plug for my gallus, and I will pitch into that like a dog at a root.’  While speaking, he was busily engaged in trying to connect his suspender with his trousers by making a ‘plug’ perform the function of a button.  Lincoln liked old-fashioned words, and never failed to use them if they could be sustained as proper.  He was probably accustomed to say ‘gallows,’ and he never adopted the modern word ‘suspender.’”

On a certain occasion Lincoln appeared at the trial of a case in which his friend Judge Logan was his opponent.  It was a suit between two farmers who had had a disagreement over a horse-trade.  On the day of the trial, Mr. Logan, having bought a new shirt, open in the back, with a huge standing collar, dressed himself in extreme haste, and put on the shirt with the bosom at the back, a linen coat concealing the blunder.  He dazed the jury with his knowledge of “horse points”; and as the day was sultry, took off his coat and “summed” up in his shirt-sleeves.  Lincoln, sitting behind him, took in the situation, and when his turn came he remarked to the jury:  “Gentlemen, Mr. Logan has been trying for over an hour to make you believe he knows more about a horse than these honest old farmers who are witnesses.  He has quoted largely from his ‘horse doctor,’ and now, gentlemen, I submit to you,” (here he lifted Logan out of his chair, and turned him with his back to the jury and the crowd, at the same time flapping up the enormous standing collar) “what dependence can you place in his horse knowledge, when he has not sense enough to put on his shirt?” Roars of laughter greeted this exposition, and the verdict was given to Lincoln.

The preceding incident leads to another, in which Lincoln himself figures as a horse-trader.  The scene is a very humorous one; and, as usual in an encounter of wit, Lincoln came out ahead.  He and a certain Judge once got to bantering each other about trading horses; and it was agreed that the next morning at nine o’clock they should make a trade, the horses to be unseen up to that hour,—­and no backing out, under a forfeit of twenty-five dollars.  At the hour appointed the Judge came up, leading the sorriest looking specimen of a nag ever seen in those parts.  In a few minutes Lincoln was seen approaching with a wooden saw-horse upon his shoulders.  Great were the shouts and the laughter of the crowd; and these increased, when Lincoln, surveying the Judge’s animal, set down his saw-horse, and exclaimed:  “Well, Judge, this is the first time I ever got the worst of it in a horse-trade!”