The frankest piece of questionable literature from Lincoln's pen in mature years, so far as I am aware, is in a private collection, and its owner does not permit it to be copied. Not many people are permitted to see it. It is probably the least attractive scrap of Lincoln's writing extant that dates from his mature years. It is undated, but belongs to the period of his life on the circuit. It is a piece of extravagant nonsense, written in about twenty lines on a quarter sheet of legal cap, and is probably the effort to recall and record something that he had heard and which amused him. Its whole point is in the transposition of the initial letters of compound words, or words in juxtaposition in a sentence, such as a speaker sometimes makes in a moment of mental confusion. Thus a cotton-patch is a "potten-catch" and a fence-corner is a "cence-forner." Every clause contains one or more of these absurdities, until a sense of boisterous mirth is awakened at the possibility that there should be so many of them. Most of them are harmless as the two above quoted, but there are two or three that are not in good taste. They are not vile nor obscene, but not very pretty. Lincoln wasted ten minutes of spare time in writing out this rather ingenious bit of nonsense, and it is not worth more than that length of discussion. It is probably the worst bit of extant writing of Lincoln's mature years, written in the period of his circuit-riding, and it has little to commend it and not a great deal to condemn. * * * * *