him in his lap, kissed him, and told him it was all
right, and that he had introduced his friend like a little gentleman as
he was. Tad was eleven years old at this time.

The President was pleased with Tad's diplomacy, and often laughed at the
incident as he told others of it. One day while caressing the boy, he
asked him why he called those gentlemen "his friends." "Well," said Tad,
"I had seen them so often, and they looked so good and sorry, and said
they were from Kentucky, that I thought they must be our friends." "That
is right, my son," said Mr. Lincoln; "I would have the whole human race
your friends and mine, if it were possible."

MIXED UP WORSE THAN BEFORE.

The President told a story which most beautifully illustrated the
muddled situation of affairs at the time McClellan's fate was hanging in
the balance. McClellan's work was not satisfactory, but the President
hesitated to remove him; the general was so slow that the Confederates
marched all around him; and, to add to the dilemma, the President could
not find a suitable man to take McClellan's place.

The latter was a political, as well as a military, factor; his friends
threatened that, if he was removed, many war Democrats would cast their
influence with the South, etc. It was, altogether, a sad mix-up, and
the President, for a time, was at his wits' end. He was assailed on all
sides with advice, but none of it was worth acting upon.

"This situation reminds me," said the President at a Cabinet meeting one
day not long before the appointment of General Halleck as McClellan's
successor in command of the Union forces, "of a Union man in Kentucky
whose two sons enlisted in the Federal Army. His wife was of Confederate
sympathies. His nearest neighbor was a Confederate in feeling, and his
two sons were fighting under Lee. This neighbor's wife was a Union woman
and it nearly broke her heart to know that her sons were arrayed against
the Union.

"Finally, the two men, after each had talked the matter over with his
wife, agreed to obtain divorces; this they, did, and the Union man and
Union woman were wedded, as were the Confederate man and the Confederate
woman--the men swapped wives, in short. But this didn't seem to help
matters any, for the sons of the Union woman were still fighting for the
South, and the sons of the Confederate woman continued in the Federal
Army; the Union husband couldn't get along with his Union wife, and
the Confederate