Daily Story
A Dog and Coon Hunting
There is one anecdote that I must tell you, that took place when he was a boy, he told me himself. He said that he used to be very fond of coon hunting and his father used to oppose this hunting, but he would slip out of a night after the old man had gone to bed, and take a hunt, but they had a small feist Dog that would detect them when they would return so one night he took the feist along, they caught a coon and skinned him and then stretched it over the little dog and sewed him up and turned him loose and put the other dogs on the track, and they ran him home and caught him in the yard, and the old man jumped up and hissed the dogs on the feist, thinking it was a coon, and they killed the feist; they couldn’t come up to his relief. The next morning when the old man went to examine the coon, it was the little dog; they were called up and were both threshed, but the little dog never told on them any more when they went a coon hunting.
Emanuel Hertz, Letter from J.R. Herndon, June 25, 1865, in Anecdotes by & about Abraham Lincoln, p. 52-53.