In the senatorial campaign at Springfield, in the winter of 1885, when General Logan’s return to the Senate was threatened by a deadlock in the Legislature, in which the balance of power was held by three greenbackers, Field made ample amends for all his jibes and jeers over Logan’s assaults on his mother-tongue.  His “Sharps and Flats” column was a daily fusilade, or, rather, feu de joie, upon or at the expense of the Democrats and three legislators, by whose assistance they hoped to defeat and humiliate Logan.  Congressman Morrison, he of horizontal fame, was the caucus choice of the Democrats.  But as the struggle was prolonged from day to day, it was thought that someone with a barrel, or “soap,” as it had been termed by General Arthur in a preceding campaign, was needed to bring the Greenbackers into camp.  In the emergency, Judge Lambert Tree, since then our Minister to Belgium, was drafted into the service, and for several days it looked as if the Democrats had struck the hot trail to General Logan’s seat.  The situation fired Field’s Republican soul with righteous indignation, and his column fairly blazed with sizzling paragraphs.  He seized upon Judge Tree’s name and made it the target of his shafts of wit and satire.  One day it was: 

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Here we have a tree.  How Green the Tree is!  Can you See the Lightning?  Oh, how red and Vivid the Lightning is!  Will the Lightning Strike the Tree?  Children, that is a Conundrum; we answer conundrums in our Weekly Edition, but not in our daily.

The next day it was: 

The Lightning did not strike the Green Tree.  But the Springfield
Politicians did.  This is Why the Tree is Green.

And then there came what I regard as one of the most telling pieces of political satirical humor ever put into English verse, its literary merit alone justifying its preservation, Field himself considering it worth copying in the presentation volume of his verse written prior to 1887: 

  THE LAMBERT TREE

  Oh, tell me not of the budding bay,
    Nor the yew by the new-made grave,
  And waft me not in spirit away,
    Where the sorrowing willows wave;
  Let the shag-bark walnut blend its shade
    With the elm on the verdant lea—­
  But let us his to the distant glade,
    Where blossoms the Lambert tree.

  The maple reeks with a toothsome sap
    That flavors the brown buckwheat,
  And the oak drops down into earth’s green lap,
    Her fruit for the swine to eat;
  But the Lambert tree has a grander scope
    In its home on the distant wold,
  For the sap of the Lambert tree is soap,
    And its beautiful fruit is gold.

  So sing no song of the futile fir—­
    No song of the tranquil teak,
  Nor the chestnut tree, with its bristling burr,
    Or the paw-paw of Posey creek;
  But fill my soul with a heavenly calm,
    And bring sweet dreams to me
  By singing a psalm of the itching palm
    And the blossoming Lambert tree._