and dismay of the night, burned without showing to any one.  Booth was perfectly at home in Ford’s Theater.  Either by himself, or with the aid of friends, he arranged his whole plan of attack and escape during the afternoon.  He counted upon address and audacity to gain access to the small passage behind the President’s box.  Once there, he guarded against interference by an arrangement of a wooden bar to be fastened by a simple mortise in the angle of the wall and the door by which he had entered, so that the door could not be opened from without.  He even provided for the contingency of not gaining entrance to the box by boring a hole in its door, through which he might either observe the occupants, or take aim and shoot.  He hired at a livery-stable a small, fleet horse.

A few minutes before ten o’clock, leaving his horse at the rear of the theater in charge of a call-boy, he went into a neighboring saloon, took a drink of brandy, and, entering the theater, passed rapidly to the little hallway leading to the President’s box.  Showing a card to the servant in attendance, he was allowed to enter, closed the door noiselessly, and secured it with the wooden bar he had previously made ready, without disturbing any of the occupants of the box, between whom and himself yet remained the partition and the door through which he had made the hole.

No one, not even the comedian who uttered them, could ever remember the last words of the piece that were spoken that night—­the last Abraham Lincoln heard upon earth.  The tragedy in the box turned play and players to the most unsubstantial of phantoms.  Here were five human beings in a narrow space—­the greatest man of his time, in the glory of the most stupendous success of our history; his wife, proud and happy; a pair of betrothed lovers, with all the promise of felicity that youth, social position, and wealth could give them; and this handsome young actor, the pet of his little world.  The glitter of fame, happiness, and ease was upon the entire group; yet in an instant everything was to be changed.  Quick death was to come to the central figure—­the central figure of the century’s great and famous men.  Over the rest hovered fates from which a mother might pray kindly death to save her children in their infancy.  One was to wander with the stain of murder upon his soul, in frightful physical pain, with a price upon his head and the curse of a world upon his name, until he died a dog’s death in a burning barn; the wife was to pass the rest of her days in melancholy and madness; and one of the lovers was to slay the other, and end his life a raving maniac.