you want so
bright and early this morning?" "Bennie's life, please, sir," faltered
Blossom. "Bennie? Who is Bennie?" asked Mr. Lincoln. "My brother, sir.
They are going to shoot him for sleeping at his post," said the little
girl. "I remember," said the President; "it was a fatal sleep. You see,
child, it was a time of special danger. Thousands of lives might have
been lost through his culpable negligence." "So my father said; but poor
Bennie was so tired, sir, and Jemmie so weak. He did the work of two,
sir, and it was Jemmie's night, not his; but Jemmie was too tired, and
Bennie never thought about himself,--that he was tired, too." "What is
that you say, child? Come here; I do not understand." He read Bennie's
letter to his father, which Blossom held out, wrote a few lines, rang his
bell, and said to the messenger who appeared, "Send this dispatch at
once." Then, turning to Blossom, he continued: "Go home, my child, and
tell that father of yours, who could approve his country's sentence, even
when it took the life of a child like that, that Abraham Lincoln thinks
the life far too precious to be lost. Go back, or--wait until to-morrow;
Bennie will need a change after he has so bravely faced death, he shall
go with you." "God bless you, sir," said Blossom. _Not all the queens
are crowned._

Two days later, when the young soldier came with his sister to thank the
President, Mr. Lincoln fastened the strap of a lieutenant upon his
shoulder, saying, "The soldier that could carry a sick comrade's baggage,
and die for the act without complaining, deserves well of his country."

When telegrams poured in announcing terrible carnage upon battlefields in
our late war, and when President Lincoln's heart-strings were nearly
broken over the cruel treatment of our prisoners at Andersonville, Belle
Isle, and Libby Prison, he never once departed from his famous motto,
"With malice toward none, with charity for all." When it was reported
that among those returned at Baltimore from Southern prisons, not one in
ten could stand alone from hunger and neglect, and many were so eaten and
covered by vermin as to resemble those pitted by smallpox, and so
emaciated that they were living skeletons, not even these reports could
move the great President to retaliate in kind upon the Southern prisoners.

Among the slain on the battlefield at Fredericksburg was the body of a
youth upon which was found next the heart a photograph of