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 set to strains of sadness.  Yet throughout all his trials he never lost the courage of his convictions.  When he was surrounded on all sides by doubting Thomases, by unbelieving Saracens, by discontented Catilines, his faith was strongest.  As the Danes destroyed the hearing of their war-horses in order that they might not be affrighted by the din of battle, so Lincoln turned a deaf ear to all that might have discouraged him, and exhibited an unwavering faith in the justice of the cause and the integrity of the Union. [Cries of “Bravo!” and cheers.]