Part 95

“Miss Todd, I should like to dance with you the worst way.” The young woman accepted the inevitable, and hobbled around the room with him. When she returned to her seat, one of her companions asked mischievously:

“Well, Mary, did he dance with you the worst way.”

“Yes,” she answered, “the very worst.”

SIMPLY PRACTICAL HUMANITY.

An instance of young Lincoln’s practical humanity at an early period of his life is recorded in this way:

One evening, while returning from a “raising” in his wide neighborhood, with a number of companions, he discovered a stray horse, with saddle and bridle upon him. The horse was recognized as belonging to a man who was accustomed to get drunk, and it was suspected at once that he was not far off. A short search only was necessary to confirm the belief.

The poor drunkard was found in a perfectly helpless condition, upon the chilly ground. Abraham’s companions urged the cowardly policy of leaving him to his fate, but young Lincoln would not hear to the proposition.

At his request, the miserable sot was lifted on his shoulders, and he actually carried him eighty rods to the nearest house.

Sending word to his father that he should not be back that night, with the reason for his absence, he attended and nursed the man until the morning, and had the pleasure of believing that he had saved his life.

HAPPY FIGURES OF SPEECH.

On one occasion, exasperated at the discrepancy between the aggregate of troops forwarded to McClellan and the number that same general reported as having received, Lincoln exclaimed: “Sending men to that army is like shoveling fleas across a barnyard--half of them never get there.”

To a politician who had criticised his course, he wrote: “Would you have me drop the War where it is, or would you prosecute it in future with elder stalk squirts charged with rosewater?”

When, on his first arrival in Washington as President, he found himself besieged by office-seekers, while the War was breaking out, he said: “I feel like a man letting lodgings at one end of his house while the other end is on fire.”

A FEW “RHYTHMIC SHOTS.”

Ward Lamon, Marshal of the District of Columbia during Lincoln’s time in Washington, accompanied the President everywhere. He was a good singer, and, when Lincoln was in one of his melancholy moods, would “fire a few rhythmic shots” at the President to cheer the latter. Lincoln keenly relished nonsense in the shape of witty or comic ditties. A parody of “A Life on the Ocean Wave” was always pleasing to him:

“Oh, a life on the ocean wave, And a home on the rolling deep! With ratlins fried three times a day And a leaky old berth for to sleep; Where the gray-beard cockroach roams, On thoughts of kind intent, And the raving bedbug comes The road the cockroach went.”

Lincoln could not control his laughter when he heard songs of this sort.

He was fond of negro melodies, too, and “The Blue-Tailed Fly” was a great favorite with him. He often called for that buzzing ballad when he and Lamon were alone, and he wanted to throw off the weight of public and private cares. The ballad of “The Blue-Tailed Fly” contained two verses, which ran:

“When I was young I used to wait At massa’s table, ‘n’ hand de plate, An’ pass de bottle when he was dry, An’ brush away de blue-tailed fly.

“Ol’ Massa’s dead; oh, let him rest! Dey say all things am for de best; But I can’t forget until I die Ol’ massa an’ de blue-tailed fly.”

While humorous songs delighted the President, he also loved to listen to patriotic airs and ballads containing sentiment. He was fond of hearing “The Sword of Bunker Hill,” “Ben Bolt,” and “The Lament of the Irish Emigrant.” His preference of the verses in the latter was this:

“I’m lonely now, Mary, For the poor make no new friends; But, oh, they love the better still The few our Father sends! And you were all I had, Mary, My blessing and my pride; There’s nothing left to care for now, Since my poor Mary died.”

Those who knew Lincoln were well aware he was incapable of so monstrous an act as that of wantonly insulting the dead, as was charged in the infamous libel which asserted that he listened to a comic song on the field of Antietam, before the dead were buried.

OLD MAN GLENN’S RELIGION.

Mr. Lincoln once remarked to a friend that his religion was like that of an old man named Glenn, in Indiana, whom he heard speak at a church meeting, and who said: “When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad; and that’s my religion.”

Mrs. Lincoln herself has said that Mr. Lincoln had no faith--no faith, in the usual acceptance of those words. “He never joined a church; but still, as I believe, he was a religious man by nature. He first seemed to think about the subject when our boy Willie died, and then more than ever about the time he went to Gettysburg; but it was a kind of poetry in his nature, and he never was a technical Christian.”

LAST ACTS OF MERCY.

During the afternoon preceding his assassination the President signed a pardon for a soldier sentenced to be shot for desertion, remarking as he did so, “Well, I think the boy can do us more good above ground than under ground.”