Nobody seemed to be
able to stop them. I hear that they had to pay several hundred dollars
for the damage done. You will be apt to think that there is too much
liberty here in the West, and perhaps that is so, but the fact is these
men are not half so bad as they seem to be. Lincoln tells me that they
are honest almost to a man and sincerely devoted to the public good as
they see it. I asked Abe Lincoln, who all his life has associated with
rough tongued, drinking men, how he had managed to hold his own course
and keep his talk and habits so clean.
"'Why, the fact is,' said he, 'I have associated with the people who
lived around me only part of the time, but I have never stopped
associating with myself and with Washington and Clay and Webster and
Shakespeare and Burns and DeFoe and Scott and Blackstone and Parsons. On
the whole, I've been in pretty good company.'
"He has not yet accomplished much in the Legislature. I don't think that
he will until some big issue comes along.
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