The canvas lay in a box of junk in an Alexandria, Va., secondhand store. But when Christine du Tant, wife of a U.S. Senate aide, unrolled it, she recognized the handsome young man it portrayed and bought it for $3. A curator of the Smithsonian Institution agreed with her: the small (10 in. by 14 in.) oil by an unknown artist is indeed of the young Abraham Lincoln, painted around 1840, and thus the earliest-known likeness of the future President. He had just turned 30 at the time and was a frontier legislator and lawyer in the midst of his off-again, on-again romance with Mary Todd (he married her in 1842).

Trick-or-treat was what 50 Pennsylvania teen-agers had in mind when they dropped around to the empty Chadds Ford studio of Artist Andrew Wyeth, 47, last Oct. 31. Not a treat but a treatment was what they needed, for they slashed Wyeth's 18th and 19th century costume collection, broke lamps and sculpture, smeared his walls with paint. Wyeth refused to prosecute. Instead, he invited the vandals around for a talk, forgiving the eight who showed up last week when they apologized and promised to do what they could to repay the $2,000 worth of damage. "I am left feeling saddest," said Wyeth, "about the failure of us who are responsible in some way for these youths. They said they had nothing to do, and I believe so deeply in the preciousness of time and in the creative use of it."

Just in case Thanksgiving wasn't enough excitement, there were two birthday parties in Jacqueline Kennedy's family last week. John-John turned four and invited a group of Manhattan preschoolers in to his Fifth Avenue home for ice cream, cake, and games. Then, with his mother and sister, he adjourned for the weekend to the family's house on Long Island, where he helped Caro line celebrate her seventh birthday with a number of her young North Shore neighbors.

"I bought bear traps and honey, all of it wasted," said a wan and relatively subdued Cassius Clay, 22, as he left Boston's City Hospital after his hernia operation. But the suffering had clearly left the winningest Pooh-Bah an older and wiser man. "When I went under surgery," he noted, "the doctor told me to count to ten, and on nine I went out. I thought it would be Listen, but I went out on nine."

It takes a heap o' birthday cake to commemorate a man's 96th birthday. And so when 250 friends of John Nance Garner gathered at his Uvalde, Texas, home, they thoughtfully brought along a two-foot-high, German-style Baum-kuchen (tree cake), and two smaller ones decorated with the six flags that have flown over Texas. Cactus Jack eyed them. He studied his neighbors, many of whom can't rightly remember the days when he was Franklin Roosevelt's Vice President, a job he liked to refer to as "a spare tire on the automobile of government." Finally someone wondered how it felt to be so old. Said Garner, with a wink: "I am the youngest man in town."

"Ten has always been my special number," Brunette Maria Elena Torch once said, and so it has always seemed. She met Architect Edward Durell Stone on a flight to Paris on July 10, 1953, ten days later accepted his proposal. Thereafter Stone's genius shone with a special brilliance, and they called the wind that fanned the flame Maria. For her he built one of his famed grillework facades on a $250,000 Manhattan town house, "just as," she explained, "the Shah Jahan did the Taj Mahal in India for his wife." But the Taj Mahal, of course, is a tomb, and behind the Stone front ember day came as well. Suing in Manhattan for a separation allowance of $6,500 a month, Maria Stone, now 38, charged that the 62-year-old architect, who earns $2,000,000 a year, beat her up, flirted with other women, and deserted her ten years and ten days after they were wed.

Presiding over the opening of New York harbor's $325 million Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, in his capacity as chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, acerbic Robert Moses, 75, paused to chat with a newly appointed woman city employee. "Why, you're not nearly as much of an ogre as I'd been led to believe!" she exclaimed in happy surprise. "Please don't let the word get around," commanded Moses. "It will ruin my reputation."

He is a Harvard man, his wife's name is Jacqueline, and for $200,000 he will become the new owner of Wexford, the Virginia hideaway built by the late President on Rattlesnake Mountain. But there the similarity ends, for Canton-born Quing Non Wong, 31, is Class of 1955 (a history and literature major), father of three daughters, and a Manhattan investment banker. Both he and his French wife are fond of horses, and since the local hunt club, Piedmont Fox Hounds, regularly traipses across the 40-acre estate, the Wongs are hoping that they will soon join the chase.

Clearly, it was a tense moment in Ottawa. The "hot line" from the home of Canada's Prime Minister Lester B. ("Mike") Pearson, 67, was in use, and North American Air Defense Command headquarters in Colorado Springs listened incredulously to the high-pitched message coming over the wires. Fortunately, Pearson added, telling the story at a rally in Manitoba last week, he was able to grab the receiver from his four-year-old grandchild, Robin Hannah, who had found the phone in a closet. "I explained to the officer on the other end that war had not begun," said Mike.

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