"May it please the Court, I had some doubt on this point myself, so I borrowed the usual manual of Postal Law, to be perfectly assured. I regret to contend that the clear letter of the law conflicts--sadly conflicts--with the view just taken by Judge S------s;" but here the bar indulged in a quiet "smile" without a stick in it, and it just popped into Mr. S------'s head, that he was out of place, and he skedaddled in haste. "The largest _pussie_ Judge that sat on our bench," remarked Will Wyatt. From that day to this, Mr. S------s, has never lost the title he so suddenly gained. I'm an Inderlid. One day while Uncle Abe was attending to a case at Mount Pulaski, (the country seat of Logan County, Illinois,) he was beset by old B------s, a worthy farmer, but a notorious malaprop, for an opinion as to his amenability to the road tax. "You look here, Mr. Lincoln, these fellows here want to make me work on the road." "Well!" said Uncle Abe. "Well, I tells them that they can't do it, cause I'm an _inderlid_, you see." (Of course Uncle Abe concurred in B------s opinion, and forgot to charge a fee.) "On another occasion, he wanted John G. Gillette, the great cattle dealer, to _proximate_ him because he'd got the best pair of cattle scales in Logan County." How Uncle Abe got his Sobriquet. Some one ventured to ask Uncle Abe, soon after his arrival at the White House, how he got the sobriquet of "Honest Abe." "Oh," said he, "I suppose my case was pretty much like that of a country merchant I once read of. Some one called him a 'little rascal.' 'Thank you for the compliment,' said he. 'Why so?' asked the stigmatizer. 'Because that title distinguishes me from my fellow tradesmen, who are all _great_ rascals.'" "So honest lawyers were so scarce in Illinois that you were thus distinguished from them?" persisted the questioner. "Well," quoth Uncle Abe, glancing slyly at Douglas, Sweet, and others from Illinois, "it's hard to say where the honest ones are." "I'll take Number Eleven too." Thirty-five or forty years ago, a trip from Sangamon or Macon County, to St. Louis, was an event to be talked of. It took as long to make it, and furnished food for as much rustic enquiry and comment, as does a voyage to Europe now. Uncle Abe had then given up rail-splitting, and was studying law. Having a little while before treated himself to a (then) rare thing, a suit of "store clothes;" and a neighbor being about to leave for St. Louis, he resolved to go along. As the teams toiled on at the rate of fifteen or twenty miles a day, they were gradually joined by others, till the train presented somewhat the sights now to be seen on our great overland routes to the Pacific.