His stories were usually suggested by the conversation or by the situation in which he was placed; but often, in the company of congenial friends, he used to sit back in his chair and indulge in what he called "a good old time;" spinning yarns of his early experiences, describing the characteristics of odd people he had known, and relating amusing incidents that occurred daily, even under the shadows and among the sorrows of war. This habit was the result of his early associations, when the corner store was the club of the frontiersman and the forum for intellectual combats as well as the stage for entertainments. There Lincoln shone as the most brilliant planet that ever illuminated the communities in which he lived, and there he developed the gift which was to afford him so much pleasure and so great relief from oppressing care. He was a poet by nature. He had a deep sentiment and a high appreciation of the beautiful in literature as well as in life. His soul overflowed with sympathy, and his great nature was so comprehensive that it could touch every phase of human interest and meet every class and clan; but he was a restless listener, and when in the mood for talking it was difficult to interrupt him. Chauncey M. Depew, relating his recollections of Lincoln says that once, while he was at the White House, "the President threw himself on a lounge and rattled off story after story. It was his method of relief, without which he might have gone out of his mind, and certainly would not have been able to have accomplished anything like the amount of work which he did. It is the popular supposition that most of Mr. Lincoln's stories were original, but he said, 'I have originated but two stories in my life, but I tell tolerably well other people's stories.' Riding the circuit for many years, and stopping at country taverns where were gathered the lawyers, jurymen, witnesses, and clients, they would sit up all night narrating to each other their life adventures; and the things which happened to an original people, in a new country, surrounded by novel conditions, and told with the descriptive power and exaggeration which characterized such men, supplied him with an exhaustless fund of anecdote which could be made applicable for enforcing or refuting an argument better than all the invented stories of the world." The humorous aspect of an appeal or an argument never failed to strike him, and he enjoyed turning the point as much as telling a story. Once, in the darkest days of the war, a delegation of prohibitionists came to him and insisted that the reason the North did not win was because the soldiers drank whiskey and thus brought down the curse of the Lord upon them. There was a mischievous twinkle in Lincoln's eye when he replied that he considered that very unfair on the part of the Lord, because the Southerners drank a great deal worse whiskey and a great deal more of it than the soldiers of the North.