"'Your enemies were constantly coming to me with their criticisms while the siege was in progress, and they did not cease their ill opinions after the city fell. I thought that the time had come to put an end to this kind of criticism, so one day, when a delegation called to see me and had spent a half-hour, and tried to show me the great mistake that you had made in paroling Pemberton's army, I thought I could get rid of them best by telling the story of Sykes's dog. "'Have you ever heard the story of Sykes's dog?' I said to the spokesman of the delegation. "'No.' "'Well, I must tell it to you. Sykes had a yellow dog that he set great store by; but there were a lot of _small boys_ around the village, and the dog became very unpopular among them. His eye was so keen on his master's interests that there arose prejudice against him. The boys counseled how to get rid of him. They finally fixed up a cartridge with a long fuse, and put the cartridge in a piece of meat, and then sat down on a fence and called the dog, one of them holding the fuse in his hand. The dog swallowed the meat, cartridge and all, and stood choking, when one of them touched off the fuse. There was a loud report. Sykes came out of the house, and found the ground was strewed with pieces of the dog. He picked up the biggest piece that he could find--a portion of the back with the tail still hanging to it--and said: "'Well, I guess that will never be of much account again--_as a dog_.'--'I guess that Pemberton's forces will never amount to much again--as an army.' By this time the delegation were looking for their hats." Like stories followed among the merry foresters. One of them told another "That reminds me"--how that two boys had been pursued by a small but vicious dog, and one of them had caught and held him by the tail while the other ran up a tree. At last the boy who was holding the dog became tired and knew not what to do, and cried out: "Jim!" "What say?" "Come down." "What for?" "To help me let go of the dog." This story, also, whatever may have been the date of it, President Lincoln used to tell amid the perplexities of the war. In the darkest times of his life at the White House his mind used to return for illustration to the stories told at this backwoods smithy, and at the country stores that he afterward came to visit at Gentryville, Indiana, and New Salem, Illinois.