could endure it no longer.
Lagging behind the rest, he waited until they had passed a bend in the
road. Then he turned and rode back as fast as his poor old horse could
carry him through the mud. Dismounting, he surveyed the ground. The pig
had struggled until it was almost buried in the mire, and was now too
exhausted to move. After studying the case as if it were a problem in
civil engineering, he took some rails off the fence beside the road.
Building a platform of rails around the now exhausted hog, then taking
one rail for a lever and another for a fulcrum, he began gently to pry
the fat, helpless creature out of the sticky mud. In doing this he
plastered his new suit from head to foot, but he did not care, as long
as he could save that pig!

"Now, piggy-wig," he said. "It's you and me for it. You do your part and
I'll get you out. Now--'one-two-_three_--_up-a-daisy_!'"

He smiled grimly as he thought of the jeers and sneers that would be
hurled at him if his friends had stayed to watch him at this work.

After long and patient labor he succeeded in loosening the hog and
coaxing it to make the attempt to get free. At last, the animal was
made to see that it could get out. Making one violent effort it wallowed
away and started for the nearest farmhouse, grunting and flopping its
ears as it went.

Lawyer Lincoln looked ruefully down at his clothes, then placed all the
rails back on the fence as he had found them.

He had to ride the rest of the day alone, for he did not wish to appear
before his comrades until the mud on his suit had dried so that it could
be brushed off. That night, when they saw him at the tavern, they asked
him what he had been doing all day, eying his clothes with suspicious
leers and grins. He had to admit that he could not bear to leave that
hog to die, and tried to excuse his tender-heartedness to them by
adding: "Farmer Jones's children might have had to go barefoot all
Winter if he had lost a valuable hog like that!"

"BEING ELECTED TO CONGRESS HAS NOT PLEASED ME AS MUCH AS I EXPECTED"

In 1846 Abraham Lincoln was elected to Congress, defeating the Rev.
Peter Cartwright, the famous backwoods preacher, who was elected to the
State Legislature fourteen years before, the first time Lincoln was a
candidate and the only time he was ever defeated by popular vote.
Cartwright had made a vigorous canvass, telling the people that Lincoln
was "an aristocrat and an atheist." But, though they h