Made Lincoln? Yes, I reckon you might say they did. There’s no denyin’ that’s when the country outside begun to take notice of him. But don’t you make no mistake, them debates wa’n’t the beginnin’ of Abraham Lincoln’s work on slavery. He’d been at it for about four years before they come off, sweatin’ his brains night and day. The hardest piece of thinkin’ I ever see a man do. Anybody that wants to hear about him back there needn’t expect stories. He wa’n’t tellin’ stories them days. No, sir, he was thinkin’. Curious about him. There he was, more’n forty-five years old, clean out of politics and settled down to practice law. Looked as if he wouldn’t do much of anything the rest of his life but jog around the circuit, when all of a suddint Douglas sprung his Kansas-Nebraska bill. You remember what that bill was, don’t you?--let Kansas and Nebraska in as territories and the same time repealed the Missouri Compromise keeping slavery out of that part of the country, let the people have it or not, just as they wanted. You ain’t no idee how that bill stirred up Mr. Lincoln. I’ll never forgit how he took its passin’. ’Twas long back in the spring of ’54. Lot of ’em was settin’ in here tellin’ stories and Mr. Lincoln was right in the middle of one when in bounced Billy Herndon--he was Lincoln’s law partner, you know. His eyes was blazin’ and he calls out, “They’ve upset the Missouri Compromise. The Kansas-Nebraska bill is passed.” For a minute everybody was still as death--everybody but me. “Hoorah!” I calls out, “you can bet on Little Dug every time,” for I was a Democrat and, barrin’ George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, I thought Douglas was the biggest man God ever made. Didn’t know no more what that bill meant than that old Tom-cat in the window. “Hoorah!” I says, and then I happened to look at Mr. Lincoln. He was all in a heap, his head dropped down on his breast, and there he set and never spoke, and then after a long time he got up and went out. Never finished that story, never said “Good-by, boys,” like he always did, never took notice of nuthin’, just went out, his face gray and stern, and his eyes not seein’ at all. Well, sir, you could ’a’ knocked me over with a feather. I never seen him take anything that way before. He was a good loser. You see how ’twas with me, Kansas-Nebraska wa’n’t nuthin’ but politics, and my man had beat. I told Ma about it when I got home. “It ain’t like him to be mad because Douglas has beat,” I says, “I don’t understand it,” and Ma says, “I reckon that’s just it, William, you don’t understand it.” Ma was awful touchy when anybody seemed to criticise Mr. Lincoln.