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Book, page 141 / 313 canceled by your defeat." He then went on, with threats equally indecent, to make certain demands which were altogether inadmissible, and which Judge Breese only noticed by sending this preposterous letter to the press. [Sidenote: "National Intelligencer," Feb. 28, 1849.] It may easily be imagined that a man who, after being elected a Senator of the United States, was capable of the insane insolence of signing his name to a letter informing his defeated competitor that he would have killed him if the result had been different, would not have been likely, when seven years younger, to bear newspaper ridicule with equanimity. His fury against the unknown author of the satire was the subject of much merriment in Springfield, and the next week another letter appeared, from a different hand, but adopting the machinery of the first, in which the widow offered to make up the quarrel by marrying the Auditor, and this, in time, was followed by an epithalamium, in which this happy compromise was celebrated in very bad verses. In the change of hands all the humor of the thing had evaporated, and nothing was left but feminine mischief on one side and the exasperation of wounded vanity on the other. Shields, however, had talked so much about the matter that he now felt imperatively called upon to act, and he therefore sent General Whitesides to demand from the "Journal" the name of its contributor. Mr. Francis, the editor, was in a quandary. Lincoln had written the first letter, and the antic fury of Shields had induced two young ladies who took a lively interest in Illinois politics--and with good reason, for one was to be the wife of a Senator and the other of a President--to follow up the game with attacks in prose and verse which, however deficient in wit and meter, were not wanting in pungency. In his dilemma he applied to Lincoln, who, as he was starting to attend court at Tremont, told him to give his name and withhold the names of the ladies. As soon as Whitesides received this information, he and his fiery principal set out for Tremont, and as Shields did nothing in silence, the news came to Lincoln's friends, two of whom, William Butler and Dr. Merryman, one of those combative medical men who have almost disappeared from American society, went off in a buggy in pursuit. They soon came in sight of the others, but loitered in the rear until evening, and then drove rapidly to Tremont,
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