about his home, looked
at his mother's photograph, and so forth. Then he laid his hands on the
boy's shoulders and said with a trembling voice, "My boy, you are not
going to be shot. I believe you when you tell me that you could not keep
awake. I am going to trust you and send you back to the regiment. But I
have been put to a great deal of trouble on your account. . . . Now what
I want to know is, how are you going to pay my bill?" Scott told
afterwards how difficult it was to think, when his fixed expectation of
death was suddenly changed; but how he managed to master himself, thank
Mr. Lincoln and reckon up how, with his pay and what his parents could
raise by mortgage on their farm and some help from his comrades, he might
pay the bill if it were not more than five or six hundred dollars. "But
it is a great deal more than that," said the President. "My bill is a
very large one. Your friends cannot pay it, nor your bounty, nor the
farm, nor all your comrades. There is only one man in the world who can
pay it, and his name is William Scott. If from this day William Scott
does his duty, so that, when he comes to die, he can look me in the face
as he does now and say, 'I have kept my promise and I have done my duty
as a soldier,' then my debt will be paid. Will you make the promise and
try to keep it?" And William Scott did promise; and, not very long
after, he was desperately wounded, and he died, but not before he could
send a message to the President that he had tried to be a good soldier,
and would have paid his debt in full if he had lived, and that he died
thinking of Lincoln's kind face and thanking him for the chance he gave
him to fall like a soldier in battle. If the story is not true--and
there is no reason whatever to doubt it--still it is a remarkable man of
whom people spin yarns of that kind.

When Lincoln's strength became visibly tried friends often sought to
persuade him to spare himself the needless, and to him very often
harrowing, labour of incessant interviews. They never succeeded.
Lincoln told them he could not forget what he himself would feel in the
place of the many poor souls who came to him desiring so little and with
so little to get. But he owned to the severity of the strain. He was
not too sensitive to the ridicule and reproach that surrounded him.
"Give yourself no uneasiness," he had once said to some one who had
sympathised with him over some such annoyance, "I have en