"WHILE WE WERE MARCHING THROUGH GEORGIA!"
The popular-song nuisance follows us here. In San Francisco it used to be "Just
Before the Battle, Mother," every night and all night long. Then it was "When Johnny
Comes Marching Home." After that it was "Wearin' of the Green." And last and most
dreadful of all, came that calamity of "While We Were Marching Through Georgia." It
was the last thing I heard when the ship sailed, and it gratified me to think I should hear it
no more for months. And now, here at dead of night, at the very outpost and fag-end of
the world, on a little rock in the middle of a limitless ocean, a pack of dark-skinned
savages are tramping down the street singing it with a vim and an energy that make my
hair rise!—singing it in their own barbarous tongue! They have got the tune to perfection—
otherwise I never would have suspected that "Waikiki lantani oe Kaa hooly hooly
wawhoo" means, "While We Were Marching Through Georgia." If it would have
been all the same to General Sherman, I wish he had gone around by the way of the Gulf
of Mexico, instead of marching through Georgia.
