| “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.”