ore than twenty-five years
afterward, when Lincoln was a candidate for the presidency of the United
States, he referred to himself in the third person in describing this
incident, saying that he was elected "to his own surprise," and "he says
he has not since had any success in life which gave him so much
satisfaction."

IGNORANCE OF MILITARY TACTICS

But Lincoln was a "raw hand" at military tactics. He used to enjoy
telling of his ignorance and the expedients adopted in giving his
commands to the company. Once when he was marching, twenty men abreast,
across a field it became necessary to pass through a narrow gateway into
the next field. He said:

"I could not, for the life of me, remember the word for getting the
company _endwise_ so that it could go through the gate; so, as we came
near the gate, I shouted, 'This company is dismissed for two minutes,
when it will fall in again on the other side of the fence.'"

A HISTORIC MYSTERY EXPLAINED

Captain Lincoln had his sword taken from him for shooting within limits.
Many have wondered that a man of Lincoln's intelligence should have been
guilty of this stupid infraction of ordinary army regulations.
Biographers of Lincoln puzzled over this until the secret was explained
by William Turley Baker, of Bolivia, Ill., at the Lincoln Centenary in
Springfield. All unconscious of solving a historic mystery, "Uncle
Billy" Baker related the following story which explains that the
shooting was purely accidental:

"My father was roadmaster general in the Black Hawk War. Lincoln used to
come often to our house and talk it all over with father, when I was a
boy, and I've heard them laugh over their experiences in that war. The
best joke of all was this: Father received orders one day to throw log
bridges over a certain stream the army had to cross. He felled some
tall, slim black walnuts--the only ones he could find there--and the
logs were so smooth and round that they were hard to walk on any time.
This day it rained and made them very slippery. Half of the soldiers
fell into the stream and got a good ducking. Captain Lincoln was one of
those that tumbled in. He just laughed and scrambled out as quick as he
could. He always made the best of everything like that.

"Well, that evening when the company came to camp, some of them had dog
tents--just a big canvas sheet--and the boys laughed to see Lincoln
crawl under one of them little tents. He was so long that his head and