"Still the question is not whether the Louisiana Government, as it stands, is quite all that is desirable. The question is, Will it be wiser to take it as it is, and help to improve it, or to reject and disperse?... Concede that the new government is to what it should be as the egg to the fowl, we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it. (Laughter.)"--(Speech by A. Lincoln, his last! in answer to a serenade at the White House, 11th April, 1865, amid illuminations for the victories.) * * * * * TOO BUSY TO GO INTO ANOTHER BUSINESS. There came into the presidential hearing a man of French accent from New Orleans. He was evidently a diffident person, not knowing how precisely to state his case. But the burden of it was that he was a real-estate holder in New Orleans, and, since the advent of military rulers there, he could not collect his rents, his living. "Your case, my friend," said the President, "may be a hard one, but it might be worse. If, with your musket, you had taken your chances with the boys before Richmond, you might have found your bed and board before now! But the point is, what would you have me do for you? I have much to do, and the courts have been opened to relieve me in this regard." The applicant, still embarrassed, said: "I am not in the habit of appearing before _big men_." "And for that matter," it was quickly responded, "you have no need to change your habit, for you are not before very big men now;" playfully adding: "I am too busy to go into the rent-collection business." * * * * * THE SCALE OF REBELS. When, at the finale, Lincoln reproved his own wife for using the hackneyed expression of rebels, suggesting Confederates, as officially accepted on both sides, a wit commented: "The Southerners will be like the Jews. As a poor one is simply a Jew, a rich one a Hebrew, and a Rothschild an Israelite, so it will be rebels, Confederates, and our Southern brothers anew!" * * * * * ONE WAR AT A TIME. When the Austrian archduke, Maximilian, was foisted upon Mexico as its emperor by Napoleon III., the Southerners, who did not have their "bellyful of fighting" by 1864, more than hinted that they would range shoulder to shoulder with the Federals to try to expel him and the mercenary Marshal Bazaine. But the President returned sagaciously: "One war at a time!" It was under his successor, Johnson, that the expulsion was effected and the upstart executed by the exasperated Mexicans themselves. (NOTE.--This was undoubtedly said, but Mr. Henry Watterson, in his lecture on Lincoln, dates it as at the commencement of the war, when Secretary Seward, to forestall possible European alliances in favor of the Confederate States, proposed waging war against France and Spain, already allied, and challenging Russia and England to follow.) * * * * *