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 b