Note 62 — Chapter XXII

Few writers who knew Lincoln intimately have given us more detailed accounts of Lincoln's career as a story teller than his friend and associate, Major Henry C. Whitney, who habitually shared his bed in the rounds of the Eighth Judicial Circuit. In his chapter on "Lincoln as a Merry Andrew," in which he tells the undignified length to which these bouts of story telling were wont to go, he says: "But it is a singular fact that Lincoln very rarely told stories in his speeches. In both his forensic and political speeches he got down to serious business, and threw away the mask of Momus altogether. I never heard him narrate but one story in a speech." Life on the Circuit with Lincoln, p. 179.