agony are heard--the broad
stage suddenly fills to suffocation with a dense and motley crowd,
like some horrible carnival--the audience rush generally upon it--at
least the strong men do--the actors and actresses are there in their
play costumes and painted faces, with moral fright showing through the
rouge--some trembling, some in tears, the screams and calls, confused
talk--redoubled, trebled--two or three manage to pass up water from
the stage to the President's box--others try to clamber up--etc., etc.

In the midst of all this the soldiers of the President's Guard, with
others, suddenly drawn to the scene, burst in--some 200
altogether--they storm the house, through all the tiers, especially
the upper ones--inflamed with fury, literally charging the audience
with fixed bayonets, muskets and pistols, shouting "Clear out! clear
out!..." Such the wild scene, or a suggestion of it, rather, inside
the play house that night.

Outside, too, in the atmosphere of shock and craze, crowds of people
filled with frenzy, ready to seize any outlet for it, came near
committing murder several times on innocent individuals. One such case
was especially exciting. The infuriated crowd, through some chance,
got started against one man, either for words he uttered, or perhaps
without any cause at all, and were proceeding at once to hang him on a
neighboring lamp-post, when he was rescued by a few heroic policemen,
who placed him in their midst and fought their way slowly and amid
great peril toward the station house. It was a fitting episode of the
whole affair. The crowd rushing and eddying to and fro, the night, the
yells, the pale faces, many frightened people trying in vain to
extricate themselves, the attacked man, not yet freed from the jaws of
death, looking like a corpse, the silent, resolute half dozen
policemen, with no weapons but their little clubs, yet stern and
steady through all those eddying swarms--made indeed a fitting side
scene to the grand tragedy of the murder. They gained the station
house with the protected man, whom they placed in security for the
night and discharged in the morning.

And in the midst of that night pandemonium of senseless hate,
infuriated soldiers, the audience and the crowd--the stage, and all
its actors and actresses, its paint pots, spangles and gaslight--the
life blood from those veins, the best and sweetest of the land, drips
slowly down....

Such, hurriedly sketched, were the accompa