dear old David Porter, as he called him. Then he settled down more
quietly, and very happily, to hear me tell in an hour the history of
fifty years.

"How I wished it had been somebody who knew something! But I did as well
as I could. I told him of the English war. I told him about Fulton and
the steamboat beginning. I told him about old Scott, and Jackson; told
him all I could think of about the Mississippi, and New Orleans, and
Texas, and his own old Kentucky. And do you think, he asked who was in
command of the 'Legion of the West.' I told him it was a very gallant
officer named Grant, and that, by our last news, he was about to
establish his head-quarters at Vicksburg. Then, 'Where was Vicksburg?' I
worked that out on the map; it was about a hundred miles, more or less,
above his old Fort Adams; and I thought Fort Adams must he a ruin now.
'It must be at old Vick's plantation,' at Walnut Hills, said he: 'well,
that is a change!'

"I tell you, Ingham, it was a hard thing to condense the history of half
a century into that talk with a sick man. And I do not now know what I
told him,--of emigration, and the means of it,--of steamboats, and
railroads, and telegraphs,--of inventions, and books, and
literature,--of the colleges, and West Point, and the Naval School,--but
with the queerest interruptions that ever you heard. You see it was
Robinson Crusoe asking all the accumulated questions of fifty-six
years!

"I remember he asked, all of a sudden, who was President now; and when I
told him, he asked if Old Abe was General Benjamin Lincoln's son. He
said he met old General Lincoln, when he was quite a boy himself, at
some Indian treaty. I said no, that Old Abe was a Kentuckian like