"'Oh, _I_ don't come for apples--I want to spark your darter!'" * * * * * THE WHETSTONE STORY. Abraham Lincoln was not given to boasting, but he did pride himself on his gift of memory of faces. It included all sorts of things. Among the soldiers calling at the White House was one from his section. He knew him at sight, used his name, and said: "You used to live on the Danville road. I took dinner with you one time I was running for the legislature. I recollect that we stood talking together out at the barnyard gate while I sharpened my jack-knife on your whetstone." "So you did!" drawled the volunteer, delighted. "But, say, whatever did you do with that stone? I looked for it mor'n a thousand times, but I never could find it after the day you used it! We 'lowed that mebby you took it along with you." "No," replied the presumed purloiner seriously, "I sot it on the top of the gate-post--the high one." "Thunder! likely enough you did! Nobody else couldn't have boosted it up there! and we never thought to look there for it!" When the soldier was allowed to go home, the first thing he did was to look up to that stone. Surely enough it was on the gate-post top! It had lain there fifteen years, since the electioneerer had stuck it there as easily as one might place it on a table. * * * * * "THE MONARCH OF ALL HE SURVEYED." Lincoln's coquetting with the science of Gunter, Jack of all trades that he was, empowered him to perpetrate a fine pun on the United States surveyor-general in California, General Beall. This official acquired in his course so much real estate of the first quality that on a reference being made to it in the President's hearing, he observed: "Yes, they say Beall is 'monarch of all he _surveyed_.'" (New York _Herald_.) * * * * * MEN HAVE FAULTS LIKE HORSES. While riding between the court towns, Menard and Fulton Counties, Illinois, Lincoln rode knee to knee with an old settler who admitted that he was going to Lewiston to have some "lawing" out with a neighbor, also an old-timer. The young practitioner already preached, as a motto, that there would always be litigation enough and again exerted to throw oil on the riled water. "Why, Uncle Tommy, this neighbor has been a tolerable neighbor to you nigh onto fifteen year and you get along in _hunk_ part of the time, don't 'ee?" The rancantankerous man admitted as much. "Well, now, you see this nag of mine? He isn't as good a horse as I want to straddle and I sometimes get out of patience with him, but I know his faults as well as his p'ints. He goes fairly well as hosses go, and it might take me a long while to git used to another hoss' faults. For, like men, all hosses hev faults. You and Uncle Jimmy ought to put up with each other as man and his steed put up with one another; see?" "I reckon you are about right, Abe!" And he went on to town, but not to "law."