The life, crime, and capture of John Wilkes Booth,: with a full sketch of the conspiracy of which he was the leader, and the pursuit, trial and execution of his accomplices./ By George Alfred Townsend.

2 Oh uiX*8. Wasing. 11
aeant who admitted him that he desired to see Mr. Seward. The ervmnt
responded that Mr. Seward was very ill, and that no visitors were admitted.
" But I am a messenger from Dr. Verdi, Mfr. Seward's physician; I have
a prescription which I must deliver to him myself." The servant still de.
murring, the stranger, without further parley, pushed him aside and ascended the stairs. Moving to the right, he proceeded towards Mr. Seward's room, and was about to enter it, when Mr. Frederick Seward
appeared from an opposite doorway and demanded his business. He
responded in the same manner as to the servant below, but being met with
a refusal, suddenly closed the controversy by striking Mr. Seward a severe
and perhaps mortal blow across the forehead with the butt of a pistol. As
'the first victim fell,1 Major Seward, another and younger son of the secretary,
emerged from his father's room. Without a word the man drew a knife
and struck the major several blows with it, rushing into the chamber as he
did so; then, after dealing the nurse a horrible wound across -the bowels,
he sprang to the bed upon which the secretary lay, stabbing him once in
the face and neck. Mr. Seward arose convulsively and fell from the bed to
the floor. Turning and brandishing his knife anew, the assassin fled from
the room, cleared the prostrate form of Frederick Seward in the hall, descended the stairs in three leaps, and was out of the door and upon his
horse in an instant. It is stated by a person who saw him mount that,
although he leaped upon his horse with most unseemly haste, he trotted
away around the corner of the block with circumspect deliberation.
Around both the house on Tenth street and the residence of Secretary
Seward, as the fact of both tragedies became generally known, crowds soon
athered so vast and tumultuous that military guards scarcely sufficed to
keep them from the doors.
The room to which the President had been conveyed is on the first floor,
at the end of the hall. It is only fifteen feet square, with a Brussels carpet, papered with brown, and hung with a lithograph of Rosa Bonheur's
"Horse Fair," an engraved copy of Iferring's "illage Blacksmith," and
two smaller ones of " The Stable" and "The Barn Yard," from the same
artist. A table and bureau, spread with crotchet work, eight chairs and
the bed, were all the furniture. Upon this bed, a lbw walnut four-poster,
lay the dying President; the blood oozing from the frightful wound in his
bead and staining the pillow. All that the medical skill of half a dozen
accomplished surgeons could do had been done to prolong a life.evidently
ebbing from a mortal hurt.
Secretary Stanton, just arrived from the bedside of Mr. Seward, asked
Surgeon;General Barnes what was Mir. Lincoln's' condition. "I fear, Mr.
Stanton, that there is no hope." "0, no, general; no, no;" and the man,
of all others, apparently strange to tears, sank down beside the bed, the
hot, bitter evidences of an awful sorrow trickling through his fingers to the
floor. Senator Sumner sat on the opposite side of the bed, holding one of
the President's hands in his own, and s6bbing with kindred grief. Secretary WVelles stood at the foot of the bed, his ace hidden, his frame shaken
with emotion. General Halleck, Attorney-General Speed, Postmaster.
Generil Dennison, M. B. Field, Asistant Secretary of the Treasury, Judge
Otto, General Meigs, and others, visited the chamber at times, and then
retired. Mrs. Lincoln-but there is no Leed to speak of her. Mrs. Senator Dixon soon arrived, and remained with her through the night. All
through the night, while the horror-stricken crowds outside swept and
gathered along the streets, while the military and police were patrolling
and weaving a cordon around the city; while men were arming and ask
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