WHIPPING AROUND THE STUMP.
On New-year's morning, 1864, President Lincoln entered the War Department building. His sensitive nature, more than ever strained to the utmost tension, was irritated by hearing a woman wailing over a child in her arms at an office door. Major Eckert requested to ascertain the cause of the grief brought back the painful but not unexampled explanation. A soldier's wife had come to Washington with her babe, expecting to have no difficulty in going on under pass to the camp where her husband was under the colors. But she learned, to her dismay, that, while an officer's wife has few obstacles to meet in communing with her husband under like circumstances, the private's is dissimilarly situated. This poor soul, with little money anyway, was perplexed how to wait in the expensive city till her wish was granted.
"Come, Eckert," blurted out the chief in his frank manner, "let's send the woman down there!"
It was recited that the war office had strengthened the orders against women in camp.
"H'm!" coughed the other in his dry way, ominous of an alternative, "let us whip the devil around the stump since he will not step right over! Send the woman's husband leave of absence to report here--to see his wife and baby!"
So the officer on duty wrote the order, and the couple were happily reunited.--(By A. B. Chandler, manager of postal telegraphs, attached to the War Department in the war.)
"LIFE TOO PRECIOUS TO BE LOST."
Benjamin Owen, a young Vermont volunteer, was sentenced to the extremity for being asleep on post. Lincoln was especially lenient in these cases, as he held that a farm-boy, used to going to bed early, was apt to maintain the habit in later life. It came out that the youth had taken the place of a comrade the night before, as extra duty, and this overwork had fatigued him so that his succumbing was at least explicable. This clue being in a letter he wrote home, his sister journeyed to the capital with it and showed it to the President.
"Oh, that fatal sleep!" he exclaimed, "thousands of lives might have been lost through that fatal sleep!"
He wrote out the pardon, and said to the girl: