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: