The Grand River memorialists made "nuts" of it, and General Jim Wilson wielded it for my benefit, in his classical stump speeches in New Hampshire.

" "Well Ma I think you would make a first class stump speaker.

But," he thought, continuing his cogitations, "Emily is too young and attractive to live alone, and what so natural as that she should ask her old aunt to come to her?" John was still deeply cogitating on this knotty point when the children came back, and conducted him and Valentine to the place where Brandon was at work, and Dorothea sitting near him on a tree-stump knitting.

In the estimation of thoughtful Americans east of the Alleghanies all that they knew of Mr. Lincoln justified them in regarding him as only "a Western stump orator"successful, distinguished, but nothing higher than thata Western stump orator, who had dared to brave one of the strongest men in the Western States, and who had done so with wonderful ability and moral success.

" They advanced to the far edge of the stump region and crouched there.

"We got so tired of the whole business, and the farmers around here spent so much time in discussing the art of roadmaking, as to whether it should be viewed from the engineering point of view, or the farmers' practical point of view, and whether we would require this number of stump extractors or that number, and how many shovels and crushers and ditchers would be necessary to keep our roads in order, and so on, that we simply withdrew.

" Like an ass, he wears out his time for provender, and can show a stump rod, togam tritam et laceram saith

By the fire sits the PIPER, on a tree-stump seat, stitching at a bit of red leather.

How they had found them in the darkness of the woodsfor we had long since left the stump-roadI do not know; but the bars were there, and a brush fence; and Murphy whispered that, beyond, a cow-path led to Beacraft's house.

The flickering light revealed a tree, freshly cut, its, naked stump gleaming and its tall form lying prone.