lifted it from the bed of coals, and thrusting it into a tub of water
near by, exclaimed: 'Well, if I can't make anything else of you, I will
make a fizzle, anyhow.'" "I was afraid that was about what we had done
with the Dutch Gap Canal," said General Grant.

A TEETOTALER.

When Lincoln was in the Black Hawk War as captain, the volunteer
soldiers drank in with delight the jests and stories of the tall
captain. Aesop's Fables were given a new dress, and the tales of the
wild adventures that he had brought from Kentucky and Indiana were many,
but his inspiration was never stimulated by recourse to the whisky jug.

When his grateful and delighted auditors pressed this on him he had one
reply: "Thank you, I never drink it."

NOT TO "OPEN SHOP" THERE.

President Lincoln was passing down Pennsylvania avenue in Washington one
day, when a man came running after him, hailed him, and thrust a bundle
of papers in his hands.

It angered him not a little, and he pitched the papers back, saying,
"I'm not going to open shop here."

WE HAVE LIBERTY OF ALL KINDS.

Lincoln delivered a remarkable speech at Springfield, Illinois, when but
twenty-eight years of age, upon the liberty possessed by the people of
the United States.

In part, he said:

"In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the
American people, find our account running under date of the nineteenth
century of the Christian era.

"We find ourselves in the peaceful possession of the fairest portion
of the earth as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and
salubrity of climate.

"We find ourselves under the government of a system of political
institutions conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and
religious liberty than any of which history of former times tells us.

"We, when mounting the stage of existence, found ourselves the legal
inheritors of these fundamental blessings.

"We toiled not in the acquisition or establishment of them; they are a
legacy bequeathed to us by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now
lamented and departed race of ancestors.

"Theirs was the task (and nobly did they perform it) to possess
themselves, us, of this goodly land, to uprear upon its hills and
valleys a political edifice of liberty and equal rights; 'tis ours to
transmit these--the former unprofaned by the foot of an intruder, the
latter undecayed by the lapse of time and untorn by usurpation--to the
generation