murder and be hanged for it; and that he could not possibly guard against all danger unless he shut himself up in an iron box, in which condition he could scarcely perform the duties of a President.  He therefore went in and out before the people, always unarmed, generally unattended.  He received hundreds of visitors in a day, his breast bare to pistol or knife.  He walked at midnight, with a single secretary, or alone, from the Executive Mansion to the War Department and back.  He rode through the lonely roads of an uninhabited suburb from the White House to the Soldiers’ Home in the dusk of the evening, and returned to his work in the morning before the town was astir.  He was greatly annoyed when it was decided that there must be a guard at the Executive Mansion, and that a squad of cavalry must accompany him on his daily drive; but he was always reasonable, and yielded to the best judgment of others.

Four years of threats and boastings that were unfounded, and of plots that came to nothing, thus passed away; but precisely at the time when the triumph of the nation seemed assured, and a feeling of peace and security was diffused over the country, one of the conspiracies, apparently no more important than the others, ripened in the sudden heat of hatred and despair.  A little band of malignant secessionists, consisting of John Wilkes Booth, an actor of a family of famous players; Lewis Powell, alias Payne, a disbanded rebel soldier from Florida; George Atzerodt, formerly a coachmaker, but more recently a spy and blockade-runner of the Potomac; David E. Herold, a young druggist’s clerk; Samuel Arnold and Michael O’Laughlin, Maryland secessionists and Confederate soldiers; and John H. Surratt, had their ordinary rendezvous at the house of Mrs. Mary E. Surratt, the widowed mother of the last named, formerly a woman of some property in Maryland, but reduced by reverses to keeping a small boarding-house in Washington.

Booth was the leader of the little coterie.  He was a young man of twenty-six, strikingly handsome, with that ease and grace of manner which came to him of right from his theatrical ancestors.  He had played for several seasons with only indifferent success, his value as an actor lying rather in his romantic beauty of person than in any talent or industry he possessed.  He was a fanatical secessionist, and had imbibed at Richmond and other Southern cities where he played a furious spirit of partizanship against Lincoln and the Union party.  After the reelection of Mr. Lincoln, he visited Canada, consorted with the rebel emissaries there, and—­whether or not at their instigation cannot certainly be said—­conceived a scheme to capture the President and take him to Richmond.  He passed a great part of the autumn and winter pursuing this fantastic enterprise, seeming to be always well supplied with money; but the winter wore away, and nothing was accomplished.  On March 4 he was at the Capitol, and created a disturbance by trying to force his way through the line of policemen who guarded the passage through which the President walked to the east front of the building.  His intentions at this time are not known; he afterward said he lost an excellent chance of killing the President that day.