I remember that one night at the White House, when a few
ladies were with the family, singing at the piano-forte, he asked for a
little song in which the writer describes his sensations when revisiting
the scenes of his boyhood, dwelling mournfully on the vanished joys and
the delightful associations of forty years ago. It is not likely that
there was much in Lincoln's lost youth that he would wish to recall; but
there was a certain melancholy and half-morbid strain in that song which
struck a responsive chord in his heart. The lines sank into his memory,
and I remember that he quoted them, as if to himself, long afterward."

Lincoln's memory was extraordinarily retentive, and he seemed, without
conscious effort, to have stored in his mind almost every whimsical or
ludicrous narrative which he had read or heard. "On several occasions,"
says Mr. Brooks, "I have held in my hand a printed slip while he was
repeating its contents to somebody else, and the precision with which he
delivered every word was marvellous." He was fond of the writings of
"Orpheus C. Kerr" and "Petroleum V. Nasby," who were famous humorists at
the time of the Civil War; and he amused himself and others in the
darkest hours by quoting passages from these now forgotten authors.
Nasby's letter from "Wingert's Corners, Ohio," on the threatening
prospects of a migration of the negroes from the South, and the
President's "evident intenshun of colonizin' on 'em in the North," he
especially relished. After rehearsing a portion of this letter to his
guests at the Soldiers' Home one evening, a sedate New England gentleman
expressed surprise that he could find time for memorizing such things.
"Oh," said Lincoln, "I don't. If I like a thing, it _just sticks_ after
once reading it or hearing it." He once recited a long and doleful
ballad, something like "Vilikins and his Dinah," the production of a
rural Kentucky bard, and when he had finished he added with a laugh, "I
don't believe I have thought of that before for forty years." Mr. Arnold
testifies that "although his reading was not extensive, yet his memory
was so retentive and so ready that in history, poetry, and in general
literature, few if any marked any deficiency. As an illustration of the
powers of his memory, may be related the following: A gentleman called
at the White House one day, and introduced to him two officers serving
in the army, one a Swede and the other a Norwegian. Immediately he
repeate