Is Joe Miller "complete?" I doubt it, maugre the pretenses of title-pages. An old joke is sometimes like a piece of painted glass in a kaleidoscope—every turn gives it a new aspect, and the new view is sometimes taken for the original phase. Perhaps this is true of some herein, although I am unconscious of that being so. If the accusation be made, try Uncle Abe first, for he is used to trials. As for me, I shall plead my privilege of telling you "the tale as it was told to me." But if these "little jokes" be not "sworn upon" for Miller, they shall stand for Uncle Abe—the writer hereof claiming only a godfathership. And others shall follow as fast as I glean them. To aid this purpose, let everybody who has a "good thing" send it to the publisher of this, and duly it will appear in the "complete" edition of Uncle Abe's jokes, always excepting the last, for the act of dying over will remind him of some little story with a hic jacet moral.

ANDREW ADDERUP.

Springfield, Ill., April 1, 1864.

LINCOLNIANA; OR, THE HUMORS OF UNCLE ABE,

Original

An Involuntary Black Republican.

Sometime after Mr. Lincoln's well remembered passage of the rebel Rubicon at Baltimore, some radical Republicans, who thought they saw some signs of the President's backwardness in vindicating the Chicago platform, went in committee to the White House to beg him to carry out his principles—or rather to stretch them in Queen Dido's style.

"I don't know about it, gentlemen," replied Uncle Abe; "with a pretty strong opposition at home and a rebellion at the South, we'd best push republicanism rather slow. Fact is, I'm worse off than old blind Jack Loudermill was when he got married on a short courtship. Some one asked him a few days after, how he liked his new position. 'Dunno,' said he; 'I went it blind to start with, and ain't had a chance to feel my way to a conclusion yet.' So it is with me. Perhaps you can see further than I can, to me the future is dark and lowering; and we have now got to feel every step of our way forward. Making Republicans used to be hard work, and I don't see as I could do much at it now, unless I proselyte by giving fat offices to weak-kneed opponents; but that," continued Uncle Abe, with a sly look toward several of his old Illinois friends, "would'nt be quite fair to those who believe that 'to the victors belong the spoils.' Your idea about pushing things reminds me of the first black Republican I ever made."

And the President threw his left leg over his right and subsided into that air of abandon which denotes his pregnancy of a good story.

"You see, gentlemen," he began, "in my boyhood days, I had a slim chance for schooling, and did'nt improve what I did have. Occasionally a Yankee would wander into Kentuck, and open a school in the log building that was a church and school house as well, and keep it till he got starved out or heard of a better location. One Fall a bald headed, sour-visaged old man came along and opened the school, and my people concluded I must go; as usual the big boys soon began to test the master, who, though he was a patient Jeffersonian Republican, seemed very tyrannical to us. My good nature singled me out soon, as the scapegoat of the school, and I got more than my share of the birch: at least, my back was as good as an almanac, for every day of the week was recorded there. But, though this record of past time was no pastime to me, I could stand it better than I could the taunts and jibes of the boys out of school.

"One morning when a half dozen of us were warming before the broad logwood fire, I noted a big fellow (who had got me flogged the day before) standing on the side opposite, his back to the blaze: both hands were partially open, one laid in the other; some would lay it to the

You are here

قراءة كتاب Lincolniana Or The Humors of Uncle Abe