some friend.  At one time, it may be, he was too ready with pardon; “You do not know,” he said, “how hard it is to let a human being die, when you feel that a stroke of your pen will save him.”  Butler used to write to him that he was destroying the discipline of the army.  A letter of his to Meade shows clearly that, later at least, he did not wish to exercise a merely cheap and inconsiderate mercy.  The import of the numberless pardon stories really is that he would spare himself no trouble to enquire, and to intervene wherever he could rightly give scope to his longing for clemency.  A Congressman might force his way into his bedroom in the middle of the night, rouse him from his sleep to bring to his notice extenuating facts that had been overlooked, and receive the decision, “Well, I don’t see that it will do him any good to be shot.”  It is related that William Scott, a lad from a farm in Vermont, after a tremendous march in the Peninsula campaign, volunteered to do double guard duty to spare a sick comrade, slept at his post, was caught, and was under sentence of death, when the President came to the army and heard of him.  The President visited him, chatted 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.