any way; but he was an unsatisfactory man to deal with in these matters. There was a great mystery as to what became of the men sent to him. In the idyllic phrase, which Lincoln once used of him or of some other general, sending troops to him was "like shifting fleas across a barn floor with a shovel--not half of them ever get there." But his fault was graver than this; utterly ignoring the needs of the West, he tried, as General-in-Chief, to divert to his own army the recruits and the stores required for the other armies. The difficulty with him went yet further; McClellan himself deliberately set to work to destroy personal harmony between himself and his Government. It counts for little that in private he soon set down all the civil authorities as the "greatest set of incapables," and so forth, but it counts for more that he was personally insolent to the President. Lincoln had been in the habit, mistaken in this case but natural in a chief who desires to be friendly, of calling at McClellan's house rather than summoning him to his own. McClellan acquired a habit of avoiding him, he treated his enquiries as idle curiosity, and he probably thought, not without a grain of reason, that Lincoln's way of discussing matters with many people led him into indiscretion. So one evening when Lincoln and Seward were waiting at the general's house for his return, McClellan came in and went upstairs; a message was sent that the President would be glad to see him; he said he was tired and would rather be excused that night. Lincoln damped down his friends' indignation at this; he would, he once said, "hold General McClellan's stirrup for him if he will only win us victories." But he called no more at McClellan's, and a curious abruptness in some of his orders later marks his unsuccessful effort to deal with McClellan in another way. The slightly ridiculous light in which the story shows Lincoln would not obscure to any soldier the full gravity of such an incident. It was not merely foolish to treat a kind superior rudely; a general who thus drew down a curtain between his own mind and that of the Government evidently went a very long way to ensure failure in war.