On a warm, bright afternoon early in September, Bowlin Green was going around the pasture to put his fence in repair, when he came upon young Mr. Lincoln.  The latter sat in the shade of a tree on the hillside.  He looked “terribly peaked,” as Uncle Bowlin, has said in a letter.

“Why, Abe, where have you been?” he asked.  “The whole village is scared.  Samson Traylor was here last night lookin’ for ye.”

“I’m like a deer that’s been hurt,” said the young man.  “I took to the woods.  Wanted to be alone.  You see, I had a lot of thinking to do—­the kind of thinking that every man must do for himself.  I’ve got the brush cleared away, at last, so I can see through.  I had made up my mind to go down to your house for the night and was trying to decide whether I have energy enough to do it.”

“Come on; it’s only a short step,” urged the big-hearted Bowlin.  “The wife and babies are over to Beardstown.  We’ll have the whole place to ourselves.  The feather beds are ladder high.  I’ve got a haunch of venison buried in the hide and some prairie chickens that I killed yesterday, and, besides, I’m lonesome.”

“What I feel the need of, just now, is a week or two of sleep,” said Mr. Lincoln, as he rose and started down the long hill with his friend.

Some time later Bowlin Green gave Samson this brief account of what happened in and about the cabin: 

“He wouldn’t eat anything.  He wanted to go down to the river for a dip, and I went with him.  When we got back, I induced him to take off his clothes and get into bed.  He was fast asleep in ten minutes.  When night came I went up the ladder to bed.  He was still asleep when I came down in the morning.  I went out and did my chores.  Then I cut two venison steaks, each about the size o’ my hand, and a half moon of bacon.  I pounded the venison to pulp with a little salt and bacon mixed in.  I put it on the broiler and over a bed o’ hickory coals.  I got the coffee into the pot and up next to the fire and some potatoes in the ashes.  I basted a bird with bacon strips and put it into the roaster and set it back o’ the broiling bed.  Then I made some biscuits and put ’em into the oven.  I tell you, in a little while the smell o’ that fireplace would have ’woke the dead—­honest!  Abe began to stir.  In a minute I heard him call: 

“‘Say, Uncle Bowlin, I’m goin’ to get up an’ eat you out o’ house and home.  I’m hungry and I feel like a new man.  What time is it?’

“‘It’ll be nine o’clock by the time you’re washed and dressed,’ I says.

“‘Well, I declare,’ says he, ‘I’ve had about sixteen hours o’ solid sleep.  The world looks better to me this morning.’

“He hurried into his clothes and we sat down at the table with the steak and the chicken and some wild grape jelly and baked potatoes, with new butter and toffee and cream and hot biscuit and clover honey, and say, we both et till we was ashamed of it.