these men," he said, " even the worst of them. Frighten them out of the country, let down the bars, scare them off!" And he threw up his hands as if he were scaring away sheep. "Enough lives have been sacrificed. We must extinguish our resentments if we expect harmony and union."

He greeted Grant, who came in on that day, with especial warmth. There would soon be good news, he said, for he had had a dream about a vessel, the same kind of dream which came to him before Antietam, Murfreesboro and Vicksburg. Grant only answered that Murfreesboro was no victory and had no important results.

He had been telling these last days of a dream that had come to him. He had retired late one night, having waited for important dispatches from the front:

"I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. It was light in all the rooms, every object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break? I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the east room, which I entered. There I

met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. 'Who is dead in the White House? 'I demanded of one of the soldiers. 'The President,' was his answer; 'he was killed by an assassin!' Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which awoke me from my dream. I slept no more that night; and although it was only a dream I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since."

At night he went to the theatre with his wife, together with a Major Rathbone and another guest, three who after the dreadful night were never to be of right mind again. A little after ten o'clock, in the midst of the performance, an actor, but not one of the company playing, had let himself into the President's box, locked the door, and pressing a revolver behind his ear, shot him, crying, "Sic semper tyrannis!" which was the motto of the State of Virginia. In jumping from the box his spur caught in the flags which draped it, and his leg was broken. Wounded as he was, he reached the door of the theatre, jumped upon a horse which he had waiting for him, and escaped. In the first hush of surprise a voice called out, “The President is shot." Then there was tumult, and a rush

for the doors.

The bullet had pierced Lincoln's brain, and he sank forward in his chair, unconscious, no cry escaping from his lips. He was carried to a little house across the street. All night through, until twenty-two minutes

past seven in the morning, his giant frame struggled with death. As he breathed his last, Stanton, weeping, exclaimed, "Now he belongs to the ages."

His assassination was part of a general plot to kill the Cabinet Ministers. Seward had been attacked that same night, but was not killed, and rumour had it that the whole Cabinet had been exterminated.

All night the City of Washington tramped back and forth in front of the little house opposite Ford's theatre. When the news was telegraphed throughout the country, it pulled down its gay flags and draped its homes in black, even to the little isolated farmhouses of the interior. The people felt suddenly that someone who had been very near to them was gone. They lingered long over his body in death. It was borne back from Washington to Springfield, his home, over the exact route he had travelled after his first election as President in 1861. In Baltimore, in Philadelphia, in Harrisburg, in Indianapolis, in almost the exact spot where he had stood and spoken to the people who had come to look upon their new President four years before, they now placed his bier. When the body reached Springfield his face had become shrunken and black. "Would that we who had known him in life had not known him in death," they cried.

The sudden snatching away of him brought a sudden realization of his powers. He became martyr and hero at once. The abolition of slavery, the undertaking of the war and the successful close of it, the preservation of the Union and the unassuming gentleness with which these colossal tasks were carried through, raised him to the heights of a legendary demi-god. Even

before the dictum of history passed its verdict of approval upon him, the masses of both Europe and America hailed him as their great leader. He became the Emancipator, the Friend of the People, the Martyr for their Cause.

In America the mourning was deepest, for they still had great need of him. Storms were brewing, and the waters that the Ship of State was yet to travel upon were black and troubled. They could ill afford untried hands at the helm. And above all it flashed across them that they had always loved the large pilot with the gnarled hands, who had brought them safely through the dreadful tempest. The great anguish that arose at their sudden loss is best given by Walt Whitman, himself a man of the people.

O CAPTAIN! MY CAPTAIN!

O Captain! My Captain! Our fearful trip is done, The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won,

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;

But O heart! heart! heart!

Oh, the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen, cold and dead.

O Captain! My Captain! Rise up and hear the bells, Rise up for you the flag is flung-for you the bugle trills, For you bouquets and ribboned wreaths for you the shores a-crowding,

For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;