"My wife and daughter are away for a visit and for two days I've had the cabin to myself. Look, ye worshipers of fire, and see how fine it is now! The homely cabin is a place of beauty. Everything has the color of the rose, coming and going in the flickering shadows. What a heaven it is when the flames are leaping! Here is Hogarth's line of beauty; nothing perpendicular or horizontal." He took Abe's hand and went on: "Here, ye lovers of romance, is one of the story-tellers of Ispahan who has in him the wisdom of the wandering tribes. He can tell you a tale that will draw children from their play and old men from the chimney corner. My boy, take a chair next to Mr. Traylor." He took the hand of the Doctor and added: "Here, too, is a man whose wit is more famous than his pills--one produces the shakes and the other cures them. Doctor, you and I will take the end seats." "My pills can be relied upon but my wit is like my dog, away from home most of the time," said the Doctor. "Gathering the bones with which you often astonish us," said Kelso. "How are the lungs, Doctor?" "They're all right. These long rides in the open are making a new man of me. Another year in the city would have used me up." "Mr. Traylor, you stand up as proud and firm as a big pine," Kelso remarked. "I believe you're a Yankee." "So do I," said Samson. "If you took all the Yankee out o' me I'd have an empty skin." Then Abe began to show the stranger his peculiar art in these words: "Stephen Nuckles used to say: 'God's grace embraces the isles o' the sea an' the uttermost parts o' the earth. It takes in the Esquimaux an' the Hottentots. Some go so fur as to say that it takes in the Yankees but I don't go so fur.'" Samson joined in the good-natured laughter that followed. "If you deal with some Yankees you take your life in your hands," he said. "They can serve God or Mammon and I guess they have given the Devil some of his best ideas. He seems to be getting a lot of Yankee notions lately." "There was a powerful prejudice in Kentucky against the Yankees," Abe went on. "Down there they used to tell about a Yankee who sold his hogs and was driving them to town. On the way he decided that he had sold them too cheap. He left them with his drover in the road and went on to town and told the buyer that he would need help to bring 'em in. "'How's that?' the buyer asked. "'Why they git away an' go to runnin' through the woods an' fields an' we can't keep up with 'em.' "'I don't think I want 'em,' says the buyer. 'A speedy hog hasn't much pork to carry. I'll give ye twenty bits to let me off.'" "I guess that Yankee had one more hog than he'd counted," said Samson. "It reminds me of a man in Pope County who raised the biggest hog in Illinois," Abe went on. "It was a famous animal and people from far and near came to see him. One day a man came an' asked to see the hog. "'We're chargin' two bits for the privilege now,' said the owner.