"PUT YOUR FEET RIGHT AND STAND FIRM!" Giving a lift in his carriage to two ladies, to the Soldiers' Home, the horses were splashing and sliding after a shower in the mire, when Mr. Lincoln assisted the frightened women to alight. He set three stones for stepping-stones in the mud, and assisted them to firm ground. He had cautioned them in making the passage: "All through life be sure you put your feet in the right place, and then stand firm!" Looking down on his muddy boots (Lincoln as a Westerner always stuck to leg-boots, and was never seen in the effeminate "Congress gaiters," by the bye), he added: "I have always heard of 'Washington mud,' and now I shall take home some as a sample!" * * * * * GET THEIR GRAVES READY! In April, 1861, a deputation of sympathizers with secession had the boldness to call on President Lincoln and demand a cessation of hostilities until convening of Congress, threatening that seventy-five thousand Marylanders would contest the passage of troops over their soil. "I presume," quietly replied Mr. Lincoln, "that there is room enough in her soil for seventy-five thousand graves?"--(Peterson's "Life of Lincoln.") * * * * * MR. LINCOLN'S OPINION OF GENERAL McCLELLAN. In the first stage of the war, when the President was commander-in-chief of the forces by virtue of his office, he played the part of the elevated boy in "The King of the Castle." Every one of his colleagues, who ought to have been his loyal supporters, until some firm stand was attained under the batteries of Richmond, civil and military, warred against him, underhandedly and haply openly. All aimed, in Cabinet and on the staff, to be ruler. The understrappers of aged General Scott upheld all that concurred with warfare, set and obsolete, of the European strategists, overthrown by the great Napoleon. The principal practiser of these tactics, the _summum bonum_, or "good thing," of the "West Pointers" was General McClellan, "the Little Mac" of his worshipers and "the Little Napoleon" of the dazzled crowd. He was, like Cassio, "a great arithmetician, who had never set a squadron in the field or the division of a battle knew," etc. Seeming utterly to ignore that the enemy was composed of men trained by their life and "genteel" occupations to shoot true, to ride like Comanches or Revolutionary Harry Lee's Light-horse, used to lying outdoors under skies genial to them, and subsisting on game and corn-cake as Marion on sweet potatoes, he expected to foil such guerrillas as "Jeb" Stuart, Mosby, and Quantrell by earthworks, which they probably would have leaped their horse over if they wanted to reach their spoil in that way. It was in allusion to this adherence to Vauban that the President, who eyed the aspiring Hotspur as Henry V. his heir, the sixth Henry, trying on his crown, observed shrewdly, when the general kept silence: "He is entrenching."