in hanging or killing these men, even the
worst of them. Frighten them out of the country, open the gates, let
down the bars, scare them off." "Shoo," he added, throwing up his
large hands like a man scaring sheep. "We must extinguish our
resentments if we expect harmony and union. There is too much of the
desire on the part of some of our very good friends to be masters, to
interfere with and dictate to those States, to treat the people not as
fellow citizens; there is too little respect for their rights. I do
not sympathise in these feelings." Such was the tenor of his last
recorded utterance on public affairs.

In the afternoon Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln drove together and he talked to
her with keen pleasure of the life they would live when the Presidency
was over. That night Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln went to the theatre, for the
day was not observed as in England. The Grants were to have been with
them, but changed their minds and left Washington that day, so a young
officer, Major Rathbone, and the lady engaged to him, both of them
thereafter ill-fated, came instead. The theatre was crowded; many
officers returned from the war were there and eager to see Lincoln.
The play was "Our American Cousin," a play in which the part of Lord
Dundreary was afterwards developed and made famous. Some time after 10
o'clock, at a point in the play which it is said no person present
could afterwards remember, a shot was heard in the theatre and Abraham
Lincoln fell forward upon the front of the box unconscious and dying.
A wild-looking man, who had entered the box unobserved and had done his
work, was seen to strike with a knife at Major Rathbone, who tried to
seize him. Then he jumped from the box to the stage; he caught a spur
in the drapery and fell, breaking the small bone of his leg. He rose,
shouted "Sic semper tyrannis," the motto of Virginia, disappeared
behind the scenes, mounted a horse that was in waiting at the stage
door, and rode away.

This was John Wilkes Booth, brother of a famous actor then playing
"Hamlet" in Boston. He was an actor too, and an athletic and daring
youth. In him that peculiarly ferocious political passion which
occasionally showed itself among Southerners was further inflamed by
brandy and by that ranting mode of thought which the stage develops in
some few. He was the leader of a conspiracy which aimed at compassing
the deaths of others besides Lincoln. Andrew Johnson, the
Vice-President,