The President had the knack of illustrating a false syllogism by a story from the front. Soldiers stole a cow from a farmyard. It had but the stump of a tail, and foreseeing that there might be a requisition by the owner, who passed for a Union sympathizer, they disguised the creature by attaching a long switch from a dead bovine. Sure enough the man came to headquarters, and from his patriotic plea of having lost much by adhering to the old cause, his demand was accorded. If he could find his lost animal, he was entitled to it and the offenders would be punished. It had not been obtained by the regular forage, that he swore. Well, he was brought by the officer seeing him round to the pen where the beeves were secured which the commissariat duly furnished. Here the rival suppliers had stabled the creature, and she was lashing off the flies with the substitute for the detached tail with supreme felicity in the lost enjoyment. The farmer scanned her with more than a merely suspicious eye, so that the lookers-on grew anxious, and the sub-officer with him, and who thought of his own plate of beef, hastened to say: "Well, you don't see anything here anywheres like your beastie, do you, old father?" "I dunno. Thar suttinly is one cow the pictur' of mine--but my Lilywhite was a stump--had a stub-tail, you know!" "Hum!" said the corporal firmly, "but this here cow has a long tail!--ain't it?" "True--and mine were a stub--let us seek farther, officer!" * * * * * PEGGED OR SEWED? Shoemaking machinery not having attained the present development which pastes imitation-leather uppers upon paper soles, the soldiers of the first Union Army had to trudge in the boots made with wooden pegs to hold the portions together; in wet weather the pegs swelled and held tolerably, but in dryness the assimilation failed and the upper crust yawned off the base like a crab-shell divided. As for the supposed sewed ones, they went to the sub-officers, but the thread was so poor that parting was as thorough as sudden. Mr. Lincoln _wonted_, as Walt Whitman says, to repeat this tale when the army contractors were swarming in his room for a bidding: "A soldier of the Army of the Potomac was being carried to the rear among the other wounded, when he spied one of the women following the army to vend delicacies. In her basket, no doubt, were the cookies to his fancy--the tarts and pies--open or covered. So he hailed her: 'Old lady, are them pies sewed or pegged?'" * * * * * SOLDIERING APART FROM POLITICS.