THE POISONING PLOT.
A servant at the White House testifies that he was approached by emissaries who offered him a sum almost preposterously large to put a powder in the milk for the Lincoln family's table. The agents knew that they were temperance followers, milk being as common as wine at previous tenants' table. This was laughed at before the shadow of Booth's patricide was cast ahead. But the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher publicly declares--and he was in the state secrets as deeply as any layman--that President-General Harrison, "Tippecanoe," was poisoned that Tyler might fulfil the plan to annex Texas as a slave State. "With even stronger convictions is it affirmed that President-General Taylor was poisoned, that a less stern successor might give a suppler instrument to manage. Who doubts now that it was attempted Breckenridge in his room?"
NOTHING LIKE GETTING USED TO THINGS!
The more evident it grew that the President, at whom the stupid jeers persisted through incurable density of his enemies, was the vital motor of the Union cause, than threats of violently removing him were continually sent him. So many such letters accumulated that he grimly packeted them together and labeled the mass: "Assassination Papers." It was a Damoclesian dagger of which he spoke lightly, because fear of death never awed him. When a man walks in the manifest path traced out for him by Heaven, he does not tremble. But friends, more concerned by the strain in watching over his safety, expressing surprise at his indifference, he tried to reassure them:
"Oh, there is nothing like getting used to things!"
MOST AFRAID OF A FRIENDLY SHOT.
General Wadsworth, in his anxiety about the President's safety in Washington, swarming with insurgent agents, set a cavalry guard over the President's carriage. He went and complained to General Halleck, in charge of the capital, saying only partly facetiously:
"Why, Mrs. Lincoln and I cannot hear ourselves talk for the clatter of their sabers and spurs; and some of them appear to be new hands and very awkward, so that I am more afraid of being shot by the accidental discharge of a carbine or revolver than of any attempt upon my life by a roving squad of 'Jeb' Stuart's cavalry."
(Since Stuart came twenty miles within the Union lines, he was the criterion of rebel raiders' possibilities.)