hundred or more, hearing what is done, suddenly appear; they storm the house, inflamed with fury, literally charging the audience with fixed bayonets, muskets, and pistols, shouting, ’Clear out! clear out!’....  And in the midst of that pandemonium of senseless haste—­the infuriated soldiers, the audience, the stage, its actors and actresses, its paints and spangles and gaslights,—­the life blood from those veins, the best and sweetest of the land, drips slowly down, and death’s ooze already begins its little bubbles on the lips.”

It appears that Booth, the assassin, had long been plotting the murder of the President, and was awaiting a favorable moment for its execution.  He had visited the theatre at half-past eleven on the morning of the 14th, and learned that a box had been taken for the President that evening.  He engaged a fleet horse for a saddle-ride in the afternoon, and left it at a convenient place.  In the evening he rode to the theatre, and, leaving the animal in charge of an accomplice, entered the house.  Making his way to the door of the President’s box, and taking a small Derringer pistol in one hand and a double-edged dagger in the other, he thrust his arm into the entrance, where the President, sitting in an arm-chair, presented to his view the back and side of his head.  A flash, a sharp report, a puff of smoke, and the fatal bullet had entered the President’s brain.

Major Rathbone, who occupied a seat in the President’s box, testifies that he was sitting with his back toward the door, when he heard the discharge of a pistol behind him, and looking around saw through the smoke a man between the door and the President.  Major Rathbone instantly sprang toward him and seized him; the man wrested himself from his grasp, and made a violent thrust at the Major’s breast with a large knife.  The Major parried the blow by striking it up, and received a wound in his left arm.  The man rushed to the front of the box, and the Major endeavored to seize him again, but only caught his clothes as he was leaping over the railing of the box.  Major Rathbone then turned to the President.  His position was not changed; his head was slightly bent forward, and his eyes were closed.

As soon as the surgeons who had been summoned completed their hasty examination, the unconscious form of the President was borne from the theatre to a house across the street, and laid upon his death-bed.  Around him were gathered Surgeon-General Barnes, Vice-President Johnson, Senator Sumner, Secretaries Stanton and Welles, Generals Halleck and Meigs, Attorney-General Speed, Postmaster-General Dennison, Mr. McCulloch, Speaker Colfax, and other intimate friends who had been hastily summoned.  Mrs. Lincoln sat in an adjoining room, prostrate and overwhelmed, with her son Robert.  The examination of the surgeons had left no room for hope.  The watchers remained through the night by the bedside of the stricken man, who showed no signs of consciousness; and a little after seven o’clock in the morning—­Saturday the 15th of April—­he breathed his last.