be acceptable. At last, after much consultation, we decided to teach them a lesson and to borrow or steal one of those cows, just as you choose to put it. But how it could be done without the cow being at once identified and recovered was the question.

At last we hit on a plan. One of our party was despatched a day's ride to the nearest slaughter-house, where he procured a long red cow's tail to match the color of the stub-tailed cow, after possessing ourselves of which animal we neatly tied our purchase to the poor stub, and with appetites whetted by long abstinence we drank and relished the sweet milk which our cow' gave. A few days afterward we were honored by a call from the commander of the fort.

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Say, boys,' said he, ' we have lost one of our cows.' Of course we felt very sorry and expressed our regret accordingly. 'But,' continued the commander, 'I came over to say that if that cow of yours had a stub tail, I should say it was ours.'

"But she has n't a stub tail, has she?' asked we, sure of our point.

"No,' said the officer, she certainly has not a stub tail.'

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'Well, she is n't your cow then,' and our argument was unanswerable as was Hamlin."

Tell a Horse's Points, not how Many Hairs in his Tail.

So voluminous a report was made by a Congressional committee upon a new gun that the President pathetically said: "I should want a new lease of life to read this through. Why cannot an investigatory committee occasionally exhibit a grain of common sense? If I send a man to buy a horse for me, I expect to have him tell me his points, and not how many hairs he has on his tail."

An Evasive Answer.

A committee of Kentuckians went to see Abraham Lincoln in 1861, with ref

erence to the abolition of slavery. Many Kentuckians owned slaves. They were anxious to remain in the Union, but they did not want to lose their bondmen. The spokesman of the party was a tall man of about Lincoln's height. He made an eloquent speech, filled with fine sentiments and flowery metaphor, and closed with a crashing peroration. After he had finished, Lincoln looked at hin a moment and then said quietly: "Judge. I believe your legs are as long as mine."

"A Little More Light and a Little Less Noise!"

At the outset of the war, when the campaign was conducted coincidently by the chief newspapers, a correspondent of a New York journal called to propose still another plan to the plan-ridden President, who listened patiently, then said: 'Your New York papers remind me of a little story.

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Some years ago, there was a gentle

man travelling through Kansas on horseback. There were few settlements and no roads, and he lost his way. To make matters worse, as night came on, a terrific thunderstorm arose, and peal on peal of thunder, following flashes of lightning, shook the earth or momentarily illuminated the scene. The terrified traveller then got off and led his horse, seeking to guide it as best he might by the flickering light of the quick flashes of lightning. All of a sudden, a tremendous crash of thunder brought the man to his knees in terror, and he cried out:

"O Lord! if it's all the same to you give us a little more light and a little less noise!'"

Take One from Three and None Remain.

In April, 1861, the patriot statesmen of the North were in a state of anxiety, as the least precipitate act might cause the wavering border States, such as Ten

nessee, Kentucky, and Missouri, to throw in their fortunes with the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, and Arkansas. Nevertheless, a deputation, boiling over with impatience arising from patriotic wrath, urged the President to do something at once.

He replied with apparent irrelevance:

If you fire at three pigeons on a rail, and you kill one, how many will be left? There was no delay in the answer: "Two!"

Oh, no," corrected he; there would be none left; for the other two, frightened by the shot, would have flown away."

Labor and Capital.

"I ask a brief attention. It is to the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody