"Well, let us get back to Ward and begin _de novo_. And, by the way, that was the first Latin phrase I ever heard. But I like Ward, because all his fun and all his yarns are as clean as spring water. He doesn't insinuate or suggest approval of evil. He doesn't ridicule true religion. He never speaks slightingly or grossly of woman. He is a one-hundred-carat man in his motives. I am often accredited with telling disgraceful barroom stories, and sometimes see them in print, but I have no time to contradict them. Perhaps people forget them soon. I hope so. I don't know how I came by the name of a storyteller. It is not a fame I would seek. But I have tried to use as many as I could find that were good so as to cheer up people in this hard world. "Ward said that he did not know much about education in the schools, but he had an idea the training there was more to make the child think quickly and think accurately than to memorize facts. If that were the case he thought a textbook on bright jokes would be a valuable addition to a school curriculum. "Ward's sharp jokes _do_ discipline the mind. Ward told Tad last summer that Adam was _snaked_ out of Eden, and that Goliath was surprised when David hit him because such a thing never entered his head before. Ward told Mr. Chase that his father was an artist who was true to life, for he made a scarecrow so bad that the crows brought back the corn they had stolen two years before. Ward believes that the riddles of Sampson, the fables of Æsop, the questions of Socrates, and sums in mathematics are all mind awakeners similar in effect to the discipline of real humor." Knowing that Lincoln had suffered a nearly fatal heart blow in his youth through the tragic death of his first love, I was interested, years after this interview with the President, to learn that there had been a startling occurrence of a very similar nature in the early life of Ward. This has been almost universally overlooked. Even his most intimate friends, including Robertson, Hingston, Setchell, Coe, Carleton, and Rider, make no mention of the tragic death of one of Ward's earliest girl friends, Maude Myrick, then residing with relatives in Norway, Maine. The township of Norway adjoins Waterford, where Ward was born, and where he lived until he was nineteen. None of Ward's biographers give details of his early life on the farm, and none appear even to have heard of Maude Myrick.