What Hill snatched from Lincoln's hand and burned was a letter which Hill had written to McNamur about Ann Rutledge. The letter was lost and picked up by the school children, who brought it to Lincoln, the postmaster. Lincoln, knowing Hill's handwriting, and guessing the nature of the letter, kept it to discuss with Hill alone; and they did discuss it together. Hill was demanding of McNamur that he either come back to New Salem, or release Ann Rutledge from her engagement; and what he learned was, that his successful rival was not now McNamur, but Lincoln. Here is what Graham says about it: "Some of the school children had picked up the letter and handed it to Lincoln. Hill and Lincoln were talking about it, when Hill snatched the letter from Lincoln and put it into the fire. The letter was respecting a young lady, Miss Ann Rutledge, for whom all three of these gentlemen seemed to have respect." Graham lived in New Salem at the time that this incident occurred. Neither Herndon nor Matheny lived there. Graham left New Salem when it ceased to be a town, and spent the remainder of his life among the people who had been his neighbors in New Salem and who became residents with him in the near-by town of Petersburg. Graham had direct access to the facts. The reason why it was not much talked about is evident enough. Hill, McNamur, and Lincoln all married, and their wives and children were living not far from where these events occurred. The triangular misunderstanding of three young men about a young woman who had died many years before was a matter for quiet gossip on the part of the older inhabitants, but it did not come to the general knowledge of the public until Herndon delivered his unwelcome lecture on Ann Rutledge. In some things he learned and told the truth. But his material had been too hastily gathered, and was too quickly rushed into a lecture to be reliable in all respects, and it requires about four titles to cover its diversified and unstratified subject-matter. Our knowledge of the burnt book is, therefore, a matter in which we come finally to the remote recollection of James Matheny on the one hand, who never saw the book, and who manifestly misunderstood some parts of the story, and the close and intimate knowledge of Mentor Graham on the other. Lincoln apparently told Matheny in confidence that he while he was living in Salem wrote an essay against the Christian religion, and Matheny regarded it as a secret but told it to Herndon. Herndon heard some gossip about a manuscript which Hill burned, and thought it to have been the same. Mentor Graham had reliable information as to what it was that Hill burned, and moreover knew from his own personal knowledge that Lincoln wrote a very different manuscript than the one of which he told Matheny, for he himself had read it, and remembered its general nature.