Daily Story
RUN, RABBIT, RUN
Mr. Lincoln enjoyed the description of how this Congressman led the race from Bull’s Run, and laughed at it heartily. “I never knew but one fellow who could run like that,” he said, “and he was a young man out in Illinois. He had been sparking a girl, much against the wishes of her father. In fact, the old man took such a dislike to him that he threatened to shoot him if he ever caught him around his premises again.”
“One evening the young man learned that the girl’s father had gone to the city, and he ventured out to the house. He was sitting in the parlor, with his arm around Betsy’s waist, when he suddenly spied the old man coming around the corner of the house with a shotgun.” Leaping through a window into the garden, he started down a path at the top of his speed. He was a long-legged fellow, and could run like greased lightning. Just then a jack-rabbit jumped up in the path in front of him. IN about two leaps he overtook the rabbit. Giving it a kick that sent it high in the air, he exclaimed: “Git out of the road, gosh dern you, and let somebody run that knows how.”
Emanuel Hertz, Anecdotes By & About Abraham Lincoln, p. 120-21.
Emanuel Hertz, Anecdotes By & About Abraham Lincoln, p. 123-24.