nd
their intellects. [Laughter.]

The names of Washington and Lincoln are inseparably associated, and yet
as the popular historian would have us believe one spent his entire life
in chopping down acorn trees and the other splitting them up into rails.
Washington could not tell a story. Lincoln always could. [Laughter.] And
Lincoln's stories always possessed the true geometrical requisites, they
were never too long, and never too broad. [Laughter.] He never forgot a
point. A sentinel pacing near the watchfire while Lincoln was once
telling some stories quietly remarked that "He had a mighty powerful
memory, but an awful poor forgettery." [Laughter.]

The last time I ever heard him converse, he told one of the stories
which best illustrated his peculiar talent for pointing a moral with an
anecdote. Speaking of England's assistance to the South, and how she
would one day find she had aided it but little and only injured herself,
he said: "Yes, that reminds me of a barber in Sangamon County. He was
about going to bed when a stranger came along and said he must have a
shave. He said he had a few days' beard on his face, and he was going to
a ball, and the barber must cut it off. The barber got up reluctantly,
dressed, and put the stranger in a chair with a low back to it, and
every time he bore down he came near dislocating his patient's neck. He
began by lathering his face, including nose, eyes, and ears, strapped
his razor on his boot, and then made a drive scraping down the right
cheek, carrying away the beard and a pimple and two or three warts. The
man in the chair said: 'You appear to make everything level as you go.'
[Laughter.] The barber said: 'Yes, if this handle don't break, I will
get away with what there is there.' The man's cheeks were so hollow that
the barber could not get down into the valleys with the razor and an
ingenious idea occurred to him to stick his finger in the man's mouth
and press out the cheeks. Finally he cut clean through the cheek and
into his own finger. He pulled the finger out of the man's mouth, and
snapped the blood off it, looked at him, and said: 'There, you
lantern-jawed cuss, you have made me cut my finger.'" [Laughter.] "Now,"
said Lincoln, "England will find she has got the South into a pretty bad
scrape from trying to administer to her. In the end she will find she
has only cut her own finger." [Applause.]

But his heart was not always attuned to mirth; its chords were often se