LINCOLN SAVES JIM JENKINS'S LIFE--NEWSPAPER ABUSE OF LINCOLN--THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION--LINCOLN IN HIS NIGHT-SHIRT--JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL--"BARBARA FRIETCHIE"--MR. STRONG COMES HOME--THE RUSSIAN FLEET COMES TO NEW YORK--A BACKWOODS JUPITER. Tom neared the White House with a beating heart. He had done what Lincoln had bade him do. The dispatches had been carried safely and had been put into General Grant's hands. But he had taken a rather large advantage of the President's smiling suggestion that he might occasionally slip into a fight if he wanted to do so. He had volunteered to go with Andrews on the railroad raid, which was to take a week, and he had been away for many weeks, during which he had been carried on the army-rolls as "missing." Would the President think of him as a truant, who had run away and stayed away from duty? John Hay's welcome of him was frigid. The boy's heart went down into his boots. But it sprang up into his mouth when he was ushered into Lincoln's room, to be greeted with the winning smile he knew so well and to be congratulated both on his bravery in going with Andrews and on his good fortune in finally getting back to the Union lines. The President was not alone when Tom entered the room. There sat beside the desk a middle-aged woman, worn and weary, her eyes red with weeping, her rusty black dress spotted with recent tears. Her thin hands were nervously twisting the petition someone had prepared for her to present to the President. She looked at him with heartbroken pleading as he turned to her from Tom and resumed his talk with her which Tom's entrance had interrupted. "So Secretary Stanton wouldn't do anything for you, Mrs. Jenkins?" he asked. "No, sir; no, Mr. President," sobbed the woman. "He said--he said it was time to make an example and that my boy Jim ought to be shot and would be shot at--at--sunrise tomorrow." The sentence ended in a wail and the woman crumpled up into a heap and slid down to the floor at the President's feet. She had gained one moment of blessed oblivion. Jim, "the only son of his mother and she a widow," had overstayed his furlough, had been arrested, hurried before a court-martial of elderly officers who were tired of hearing the frivolous excuses of careless boys for not coming back promptly to the front, had been found guilty of desertion, and had been sentenced to be shot in a week. Six days the mother had haunted the crowded anteroom of the stern Secretary of War, bent beneath the burden of her woe. Admitted at last to his presence, her plea for her boy's life had been ruthlessly refused.