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.

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

of clerk in a store," to use his own language, he then went into the Black Hawk war and was elected captain of a company of mounted volunteers. In one of the great debates between Lincoln and Douglas, at Ottawa, in 1858, he, in a somewhat patronizing manner and in a spirit of badinage, spoke of having known Lincoln for "twenty-four years" and when a "flourishing grocery-keeper" at New Salem. The occasion was too good a one not to furnish a repartee, and the people insisted that while Lincoln denied that he had been a flourishing "grocerykeeper" as stated, yet added that, if he had been, it was "certain that his friend, Judge Douglas, would have been his best customer." The Black Hawk war over, Mr. Lincoln returned to New Salem to eke out a scanty existence by doing small jobs of surveying and by drawing up deeds and legal instruments for his neighbors. In 1834, still living in New Salem, he was one of nine members elected from Sangamon County to the lower house of the Legislature.

I landed at Galena by a Mississippi River steamboat, on the first day of April, 1840, ten years after Hanks and Lincoln were splitting rails in Macon County.

The country was then fairly entered on that marvelous Presidential campaign between Van Buren and Harrison, by far the most exciting election the country has ever seen, and which, in my judgment,