card into the hands of the attendant who sat there, hastily entered the vestibule, and closed and fastened the door behind him.  A moment later the noise of a pistol shot astounded every one, and instantly a man was seen at the front of the President’s box; Major Rathbone sprang to grapple with him, but was severely slashed in the arm and failed to retard his progress; he vaulted over the rail to the stage, but caught his spur in the folds of the flag, so that he did not alight fairly upon his feet; but he instantly recovered himself, and with a visible limp in his gait hastened across the stage; as he went, he turned towards the audience, brandished the bloody dagger with which he had just struck Rathbone, and cried “Sic semper tyrannis!” Some one recognized John Wilkes Booth, an actor of melodramatic characters.  The door at the back of the theatre was held open for him by Edward Spangler, an employee, and in the alley hard by a boy, also employed about the theatre, was holding the assassin’s horse, saddled and bridled.  Booth kicked the boy aside, with a curse, climbed into the saddle with difficulty,—­for the small bone of his leg between the knee and ankle had been broken in his fall upon the stage,—­and rode rapidly away into the night.  Amid the confusion, no efficient pursuit was made.

The President had been shot at the back of the head, on the left side; the bullet passed through the brain, and stopped just short of the left eye.  Unconsciousness of course came instantaneously.  He was carried to a room in a house opposite the theatre, and there he continued to breathe until twenty-two minutes after seven o’clock in the morning, at which moment he died.

* * * * *

The man Booth, who had done this deed of blood and madness, was an unworthy member of the family of distinguished actors of that name.  He was young, handsome, given to hard drinking, of inordinate vanity, and of small capacity in his profession; altogether, he was a disreputable fellow, though fitted to seem a hero in the eyes of the ignorant and dissipated classes.  Betwixt the fumes of the brandy which he so freely drank and the folly of the melodramatic parts which he was wont to act, his brain became saturated with a passion for notoriety, which grew into the very mania of egotism.  His crime was as stupid as it was barbarous; and even from his own point of view his achievement was actually worse than a failure.  As an act of revenge against a man whom he hated, he accomplished nothing, for he did not inflict upon Mr. Lincoln so much as one minute of mental distress or physical suffering.  To the South he brought no good, and at least ran the risk of inflicting upon it much evil, since he aroused a vindictive temper among persons who had the power to carry vindictiveness into effect; and he slew the only sincere and powerful friend whom the Southerners had among their conquerors.  He passed a miserable existence for eleven days after