Ward had never heard the conundrum and did not give the answer Tad expected, but he had one of his own, for he exclaimed "Adam was 'snaked' out." It took Tad some little time to fathom this reply and gave him some splendid mental exercise. Mr. Lincoln said he did not see why they did not have a course of humor in the schools. It was characteristic of his great modesty that whenever he referred to school or to college Lincoln always tried to limit himself by saying that, as he did not know what they did learn there, he was not an authority on the subject, but that such-and-such a thing was just "his notion." If discipline was a subjective purpose in Lincoln's use of humor, it may be said with equal certainty that the illustrative power of a well-told story was the principal objective use to which he put it. Lincoln seems never to have told a story simply to relate it; everyone he told had an application aside from the story itself. There is something profoundly elemental about this; it is like the use of the parable in the teachings of Christ. Astute minds, capable of grasping the meaning of facts without illustration, sometimes resented this habit of the President's; some of the sharpest criticism, as might be expected, came from within the Cabinet itself; but there can certainly be no just foundation for the statement that Lincoln detained a full session of the Cabinet to read them two chapters in Artemus Ward's book. He was not frivolous or shallow. His reverence for great men, for great thoughts, and for great occasions was most sensitively acute. He recognized the fact that "brevity is the soul of wit," and would not have done more than use a condensed and brief reference to Ward, at most. We know that on another occasion he made most effective use at a Cabinet meeting of Ward's burlesque on Shaw patriotism when he quoted Ward as saying that he "was willing, if need be, to sacrifice all his wife's relations for his country." An even better example of the President's use of humor is the following story which he once told to illustrate the military situation existing at the time. A bull was chasing a farmer around a tree. The farmer finally got hold of the bull's tail, and both started off across the field. The farmer could not let go for fear he would fall and break his head, but he called out to the bull, "Who started this mess, anyway?" Lincoln said he had gotten hold of the bull by the tail and that while the Confederacy was running away he dared not let go. This summed up the situation in a way the whole country could understand.