Tom took the widow Jenkins, dazed with her happiness, to the War Department, where the formal order was entered that sent Jim Jenkins back to the front, resolute to pay his country for the life the President had given him. Only when the order had been entered did the mother remember the envelope clutched in her hand which the President had given her. It contained no words, unless it be true that "money talks." It held a twenty-dollar bill. Mrs. Jenkins had spent her last cent on her journey to Washington and her six days' stay there. Abraham Lincoln's gift sent her safely back to home and happiness. When once again she had occasion to weep over her son, a year later, her tears were those of a hero's mother. For Jim Jenkins died a hero's death at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on July 4, 1863, that day of "the high tide of the Confederacy," when Robert E. Lee, the great Confederate commander, saw the surge of his splendid soldiers break in vain upon the rocks of the Union line, in the heart of the North. The bullet that killed Jim Jenkins tore through the picture of Abraham Lincoln Jim always wore over his heart. And Lincoln found time in that great hour of the country's salvation to turn aside from the myriad duties of every day long enough to write Jim Jenkins' mother a letter about her dead son's gift of his life to his country, a letter of a marvelous sympathy and of a wondrous consolation, which was buried with the soldier's mother not long afterwards, when she rejoined in a world of peace her soldier son. Mrs. Jenkins's experience with Stanton was a typical one. Everybody hated to come in contact with the surly Secretary. One day, when Private Secretary Nicolay was away, Hay came into the offices with a letter in his hand and a cloud on his usually gay brow. "Nicolay wants me to take some people to see Stanton," he said. "I would rather make the tour of a smallpox hospital." Lincoln always shrank from studying the records of court-martials, but he often had to do so, that justice or injustice might be tempered by mercy. He caught at every chance of showing mercy. A man had been sentenced to be shot for cowardice. "Oh, I won't approve that," said the President. "'He who fights and runs away, may live to fight another day.' Besides, if this fellow is a coward, it would frighten him too terribly to shoot him." The next case was that of a deserter. After sentence, he had escaped and had reached Mexico. "I guess that sentence is all right," Lincoln commented. "We can't catch him, you see. We'll condemn him as they used to sell hogs in Indiana, 'as they run.'" * * * * *