A gentleman calling at the White House one evening carried a cane, which, in the course of conversation, attracted the President’s attention. Taking it in his hand, he said: “I always used a cane when I was a boy. It was a freak of mine. My favorite one was a knotted beech stick, and I carved the head myself. There’s a mighty amount of character in sticks. Don’t you think so? You have seen these fishing-poles that fit into a cane? Well that was an old idea of mine. Dogwood clubs were favorite ones with the boys. I suppose they use them yet. Hickory is too heavy, unless you get it from a young sapling. Have you ever noticed how a stick in one’s hand will change his appearance? Old women and witches wouldn’t look so without sticks. Meg Merrilies understands that.” One of Mr. Lincoln’s “illustrations” in my hearing, on one occasion, was of a man who, in driving the hoops of a hogshead to “head” it up, was much annoyed by the constant falling in of the top. At length the bright idea struck him of putting his little boy inside to “hold it up.” This he did; it never occurring to him till the job was done, how he was to get his child out. “This,” said he, “is a fair sample of the way some people always do business.” In a time of despondency, some visitors were telling the President of the “breakers” so often seen ahead--“this time surely coming.” “That,” said he, “suggests the story of the school-boy, who never could pronounce the names ‘Shadrach,’ ‘Meshach,’ and ‘Abednego.’ He had been repeatedly whipped for it without effect. Sometime afterwards he saw the names in the regular lesson for the day. Putting his finger upon the place, he turned to his next neighbor, an older boy, and whispered, ‘Here come those “tormented Hebrews” again.’” Referring to the divisions upon the Missouri Compromise, Mr. Lincoln once said: “It used to amuse me to hear the slave-holders talk about wanting more territory, because they had not room enough for their slaves; and yet they complained of not having the slave-trade, because they wanted more slaves for their room.” Speaking on a certain occasion, of a prominent man who had the year before been violent in his manifestations of hostility to the Administration, but was then ostensibly favoring the same policy previously denounced, Mr. Lincoln expressed his entire readiness to treat the past as if it had not been, saying, “I choose always to make my ‘statute of limitations’ a short one.”