An old man had come to Lincoln for his son, who was to be shot, and said: "Mr. Lincoln, my wife sent me to you. We had three boys. They all joined your army. One of 'em has been killed, one's a-fighting now, and one of 'em, the youngest, has been tried for deserting, and he's going to be shot day after to-morrow. He never deserted. He's wild and may have drunk too much and wandered off, but he never deserted. 'Tain't in the blood. He's his mother's favorite, and if he's shot I know she'll die." General Butler was telegraphed to to suspend the execution. The old man was afraid to go home with this message, thinking the President might give a different order to-morrow. Lincoln said to the old man: "Tell his mother that I said, 'If your son lives until they get further orders from me, when he does die people will say that old Methuselah was a baby compared to him.'" It is said that the best result which the convention achieved at Cleveland in 1864, when it nominated Fremont for the presidency and John Cochrane for the vice-presidency, was that it called forth a bit of wit from the President. Some one remarked to him that, instead of the expected thousands, only about four hundred persons were present. He turned to the Bible which, say Nicolay and Hay, commonly lay on his desk, and read I Sam. 22. 2: "And every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was in bitterness of soul, gathered themselves unto him; and he became a captain over them: and there were with him about four hundred men." A primary and intermediate school was so located as to be separated by a fence from the rear of the White House grounds. The President often watched the children play. One morning the teacher gave them a lesson in neatness, and asked each boy to come to school next day with his shoes blacked. They all obeyed. One of them, John S., a poor one-armed lad, had used stove polish, the only kind his home afforded. The boys were merciless in their ridicule. The boy was only nine years old, the son of a dead soldier, his mother a washerwoman, with three other children to provide for. The President heard the boys jeering Johnny, and learned the facts about the boy. The next day John S. came to school with a new suit and with new shoes, and told that the President had called at his home and took him to the store and bought two suits of clothes for him and clothes for his sisters, and sent coal and groceries to the house. In addition to this the lad brought to the teacher a scrap of paper containing a verse of Scripture, which Mr. Lincoln had requested to have written upon the blackboard: "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."