"Look here, Needham," said the badgered man, at last, "if you are not satisfied that I can throw you every time, and want to be convinced through a thrashing, I will do that, too, for your sake!" The man "backed out." But he was ever afterward one of the champion's warmest friends. * * * * * BOATING ON GROUND "A LEETLE DAMP." In a letter of August, 1862, the President alludes to the amphibious minor navy, which made their tracks "wherever the ground was a little damp." This is hardly an exaggeration of Western shallow-water navigation. Lincoln, as pilot on the Sangamon River in 1831, was engaged to run a steamboat called the _Talisman_, after Sir Walter Scott's popular romance. It was to test the point whether the Sangamon River was navigable or not, an important local problem on which Lincoln, later, got into the legislature. As he had "tried" the river a good deal with the flatboats, he answered, he would try and do the best he could. A large crowd flocked in from all sides to witness the experiment. Lincoln guided the bark well up to the New Salem dam. Here a gap had been cut to let the vessel slip through. But at a place called Bogue's Mill, the water was rapidly lowering, and they had to wheel about and get back, or be shoaled and be held there until the spring freshets. The return trip was slow, as, though the stream was in his favor, the high prairie wind delayed the boat. The falling water had made the broken hole in the dam impracticable. But Lincoln backed the _Talisman_ off as soon as she stranded and stuck; and, by casting an anchor so as to act as a gigantic grapnel, to tear away some more of the dam, the opening sufficed for the boat to "coast" on the stones and get over into deep water. "I think," says an old boatman--J. R. ("Row") Herndon--"that the captain gave Lincoln forty dollars to keep on to Beardstown. I am sure I got that!" * * * * * THE INITIATOR INSTALLED.