George Patten, aged eight, boasted at school about having met Abraham Lincoln. The boy's friends thought he had made the story up, and bullied him. On 19 March 1861, Lincoln took the trouble to write to the boy's class: "To whom it may concern: I did see and talk with George Evans Patten, last May, at Springfield, Illinois. Respectfully, A. Lincoln." The letter has been put up for sale by Philadelphia's Raab Collection at $60,000. Last year another letter written by Lincoln to a group of children sold for $3.4m – a record for a manuscript in the United States.