I finally was forced to give it up, at which I very unexpectedly found myself mortified almost beyond endurance.  I was mortified, it seemed to me, in a hundred different ways.  My vanity was deeply wounded by the reflection that I had so long been too stupid to discover her intentions, and at the same time never doubting that I understood them perfectly; and also that she, whom I had taught myself to believe nobody else would have, had actually rejected me with all my fancied greatness.  And, to cap the whole, I then for the first time began to suspect that I was really a little in love with her.  But let it all go!  I’ll try and outlive it.  Others have been made fools of by the girls, but this can never in truth be said of me.  I most emphatically, in this instance, made a fool of myself.  I have now come to the conclusion never again to think of marrying, and for this reason—­I can never be satisfied with any one who would be blockhead enough to have me.

When you receive this, write me a long yarn about something to amuse me.  Give my respects to Mr. Browning.

From a Debate between Lincoln, E.D.  Baker, and others against Douglas, Lamborn, and others.  Springfield.  December 1839

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...  Mr. Lamborn insists that the difference between the Van Buren party and the Whigs is, that although the former sometimes err in practice, they are always correct in principle, whereas the latter are wrong in principle; and the better to impress this proposition, he uses a figurative expression in these words:  “The Democrats are vulnerable in the heel, but they are sound in the heart and in the head.”  The first branch of the figure—­that is, that the Democrats are vulnerable in the heel—­I admit is not merely figuratively but literally true.  Who that looks but for a moment at their Swartwouts, their Prices, their Harringtons, and their hundreds of others, scampering away with the public money to Texas, to Europe, and to every spot of the earth where a villain may hope to find refuge from justice, can at all doubt that they are most distressingly affected in their heels with a species of running fever?  It seems that this malady of their heels operates on the sound-headed and honest-hearted creatures very much like the cork leg in the song did on its owner, which, when he had once got started on it, the more he tried to stop it, the more it would run away.  At the hazard of wearing this point threadbare, I will relate an anecdote which seems to be too strikingly in point to be omitted.  A witty Irish soldier who was always boasting of his bravery when no danger was near, but who invariably retreated without orders at the first charge of the engagement, being asked by his captain why he did so, replied, “Captain, I have as brave a heart as Julius Caesar ever had; but somehow or other, whenever danger approaches, my cowardly legs will run away with it.”  So it is with Mr. Lamborn’s party.  They take the public money into their hands for the most laudable purpose that wise heads and honest hearts can dictate, but before they can possibly get it out again, their rascally vulnerable heels will run away with them....