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.

58. Lufe, Crim.. dul Capture of JTAn Wil**# Booa.
sprinkled with the sparse library of a country lawyer, but lately plethorni
like the thin body which has departed in its coffin.'hey are taking away
IMr. Lincoln's private effects, to deposit them wheresoever his family may
abide, and the emptiness of the place, on this sunny Sunday, revives that
feeling of desolation from which the land has scarce recovered. I rise
from my seat and examine the mnaps; they are.froni the coast survey and
engineer departments, and exhibit all the contested grounds )f the war;
there are pencil lines upon them where some one has traced the route of
armies, and planned the strategic circumferences of campaigns. Was it
the dead President who so followed the march of empire, and dotted the
sites of shock and overthrow?
Here is the Maflassa country-here the long reach of the wasted Shen andoah; here the wavy line of the James and the sinuous peninsula. The
wide campagna of the gulf country sways in the Potomac breeze that fil ters in at the window, and the Mississippi climbs up the wall, with blotches
of blue and red to show where blood gushed at the bursting of deadly
bombs. So, in the half-gloomy, half-grand apartment, roamed the tall and
wrinkled figurewhom the country had summoned from his plain home into
mighty history, with the geography of the republic drawn into a narrow
compass so that he might lay his great brown hand upon it everywhere.
And walking to and fro, to and fro, to measure the destinies of arms, he
often stopped, with his thoughtful eyes upon the carpet, to ask if his life
were real and if he were the arbiter of so tremendous issues, or whether
it wNas not all a. fever-dream, snatched from his sofa in the routine office of
the Prairie state.
There is but one pieture on the marble mantel over the cold grate-John
Bright, a photograph.
I tan well imagine how the mind of Mr. Lincoln often went afar to the
face of Bright, who said so kindly things of him when EuropA was mocking his homely guise and provincial phraseology. To Mr. Lirt... Y7hn
Bright was the standard-bearer of America and democracy in the old
world. He thrilled over Bright's bold denunciations of peer and "Privi.
leg,,e," and stretched his long arm across the Atlantic to take that daring
Quaker innovator by the hand.
I see some books on the table; perhaps they have lain there undisturbed
gce the reader's dimming eyes grew nerveless. A parliamentary manual,
a Thesaurus, and two books of humor, "Orpheus C. Kerr," and "Artemus
Ward." These last were read by Mr. Lincoln in the pauses of his hard
day's labor. Their tenure here bears out the popular verdict of his partiality for a good joke; and, through the window,. from the seat of Mfr.
Lincoln, I see across the grassy grounds of the capitol, the broken shaft of
the Washington Monuument, the long bridge and the fort-tipped Heights of
Arlington, reaching down to the shining river side. These scenes he looked
at often to catch some freshness of leaf and water, and often raised the sash
to let the world rush in where only the nation abided, and he'nce on that
awful night, he departed early, to forget this room and its close applications
in the abandon of the theater.
I wonder if that were the least of Booth's crimes-to slay this public
servant in the stolen hour of recreation he enjoyed but seldom. We
worked his life out here, and killed him when he asked a holiday.
Outside of this room there is an office, where his secretaries sat-a room
more narrow but as long-and opposite this adjacent office, a second door,
directly behind Mr. Lincoln's chair leads by a private passage to his family
quarters. Thin passage is his only monument in the building;. he added