filled up, a part already completed, he turned to me and said: " Grant, do you know what this reminds me of? Out in Springfield, Illinois, there was a blacksmith named - One day, when he did not have much to do, he took a piece of soft iron that had been in his shop for some time, and for which he had no special use, and, starting up his fire, began to heat it. When he got it hot he carried it to the anvil and began to hammer it, rather thinking he would weld it into an agricultural implement. He pounded away for some time until he got it fashioned into some shape, when he discovered that the iron would not hold out to complete the implement he had in mind. He then put it back into the forge, heated it up again, and recommenced hammering, with an illdefined notion that he would make a claw hammer, but after a time he came to the conclusion that there was more iron there than was needed to form a hammer. Again he heated it, and thought he would make an axe. After hammering and welding it into shape, knocking the oxydized iron off in flakes, he concluded there was not enough of the iron left to make an axe that would be of any use. He was now getting tired and a little disgusted at the result of his various essays. So he filled his forge full of coal, and, after placing the iron in the center of the heap, took the bellows and worked up a tremendous blast, bringing the iron to a white heat. Then with his

tongs he lifted it from the bed of coals, and thrusting it into a tub of water near by, exclaimed with an oath, 'Well, if I can't make anything else of you, I will make a fizzle, anyhow.""

I replied that I was afraid that was about what we had done with the Dutch Gap Canal.

ULYSSES S. GRANT.

II.

ELIHU B. WASHBURNE.

R. LINCOLN was nearly eight years my

MR. years before

senior, and settled in Illinois ten years before

I did. We first find him in the State splitting rails with Thomas Hanks, in Macon County, in 1830. Not long afterward he made his way to New Salem, an unimportant and insignificant village on the Sangamon River, in the northern part of Sangamon County, fourteen miles from Springfield. In 1839 a new county was laid off, named "Ménard," in honor of the first lieutenant-governor of the State, a French Canadian, an early settler of the State and a man whose memory is held in reverence by the people of Illinois, for his enterprise, benevolence and the admirable personal traits which adorned his character. A distinguished and wealthy citizen of St. Louis, allied to him by marriage, Mr. Charles Pierre Chouteau, is now erecting a monument to him, to be placed in the State-house grounds at Springfield. The settlement of New Salem, now immortalized as the early home of Lincoln, fell within the new county of "Ménard." Remaining there "as a sort