There was an old woman in Illinois who missed some of her chickens, and couldn't imagine what had become of them. Someone suggested that they had been carried off by a skunk; so she told her husband he must sit up that night and shoot the 'critter.' The old man sat up all night, and next morning came in with two pet rabbits. 'Thar,' said he, 'your chickens are all safe; thar's two of them skunks I killed!' 'Them ain't skunks,' said the old woman; them's my pet rabbits; you allers was a fool!' 'Well, then,' returned the old man, 'if them ain't skunks I don't know a skunk when I sees it.'

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "There was an old woman in Illinois who missed some of her chickens, and couldn't imagine what had become of them. Someone suggested that they had been carried off by a skunk; so she told her husband he must sit up that night and shoot the 'critter.' The old man sat up all night, and next morning came in with two pet rabbits. 'Thar,' said he, 'your chickens are all safe; thar's two of them skunks I killed!' 'Them ain't skunks,' said the old woman; them's my pet rabbits; you allers was a fool!' 'Well, then,' returned the old man, 'if them ain't skunks I don't know a skunk when I sees it.'" in the context of "Abraham Lincoln, as quoted in Incidents and Anecdotes of the Civil War (1885), by David Dixon Porter, p. 63" to mean that wisdom is timeless.